Review: Fat Ham by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
We were surprised, captivated, and thoroughly entertained by Austin Playhouse's production of Fat Ham, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama directed by Ben Wolfe. The notion of combining Shakespeare's dark plot and soaring verse with the story of a Black family in Appalachia could have been a bridge too far, but playwright James Ijames adapted only the sketchiest outlines of Hamlet while delving deeply into family dynamics, frustrations, and existential musing. With the barest shell of the classic play he constructed a contemporary world both familiar and yet wildly different from the typical everyday of people who go to the theatre. This cast exults in the rich vernacular language and caustic comments that sound thoroughly authentic to those who don't know this world.
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Marc Pouhé anchors the work in his dual roles as the ghost of Pap, stabbed to death in prison while serving a life sentence, and Pap's brother Rev, the strutting, arrogant son-of-a-bitch who's just married our protagonist's mother Tedra (Dr. Yunina Barbour-Payne). Pouhé's roles aren't the typical angel on one shoulder and devil on the other; instead, both the Hamlet ghost and the Claudius figure are selfish, cocky, and mocking. The tension in the piece is directed against Hamlet-figure Juicy, the quietly thoughtful gay son who the ghost of Pap insists must murder his uncle. This is no court of law; the ghost of Pap, still clad in his blood-stained butcher's uniform, claims that Rev had him shanked. When the subject comes up, Rev laughs it off, even embraces the idea, and we have no idea whether that accusation's a true bill.
That's the shell. Within it is the vivid, occasionally bizarre life of the family. Ijames places his story in "a house in North Carolina. Could also be Virginia, or Maryland or Tennessee. It is not Mississippi, or Alabama or Florida. That's a different thing altogether." This small clan is as full of incongruities as The Beverley Hillbillies was, back in the day, with the marked difference that Fat Ham folk live in their sealed-off Appalachian world, and Ijames is caricaturing—in an immensely loving way—small-town Black culture. Barbecue; prayer circles; singing; the domineerng, dressed-to-the-nines auntie (Gina Houston), Barbour-Payne as the young mom who's flirty and carefree; dour Opal (Vivian Noble), who's as close to a redneck Goth as you'll find; shy, straight-arrow marine Larry (Nicholas Hunter) who yearns to perform, and stoner buddy Tio (Addrian Shontal) who's the first to glimpse Pap's ghost and delivers a marvelous delirium of his own late in the play.
There's a lot of joy and a lot of acceptance of difference in Fat Ham. The dilemma of commanded revenge haunts our protagonist Juicy. It's a binary choice; either/or. His delay in reacting turns out not to be hesitation but rather a slow, deliberate step sideways, denying forced choice. This is mirrored in the playwright's depiction of sexuaity. The older men, dead Pap and Rev, are mindlessly macho; the younger men are softer, perhaps bisexual, and pleased to party, with a fine drag performance that comes out of nowhere. Opal, the Ophelia character, could be asexual or perhaps lesbian. Adult women adhere to more conventional roles; Hamlet's mom Tedra is a cheery, flighty woman happy to keep her man happy; Aunt Rabby, played by the phenomenal Gina Houston, is an upright, righteous, church-going widow.
Director Ben Wolfe keeps these talented performers in bright, kinetic motion, especially in the dance numbers. Bad ol' Rev gets his comeuppance at last, choking on a barbecue rib and sinking lifeless behind the picnic table. Nobody seems too disturbed by that; life is too full of joy for him to throw shade on it. In one recent Chicago production of Fat Ham, Rev coughed and twitched and stood up in time to dance in the finale as if nothing had happened; director Wolfe keeps the bad guy thoroughly dead with the witty decision to bring Pouhé to his feet to join the choreography in a distinctly Michael Jackson Thriller slouch. He's dead but he can't resist the music.
The characters of Fat Ham are so vivdly drawn that upon reflection one could feel short-changed by the easy, celebratory ending. We're teased by a tenderly played potential gay relationship that's blown away by the surprise drag performance; unhappy Opal slumps watching the barbecue wedding dinner and doesn't figure further in the plot; Gina Houston's Aunt Rabby is too forthright a character to be relegated to a prayer circle. And there's Albert Igbinigie as Juicy, the protagonist; director Wolfe's note rightly poses the question, "What if the inevitable isn't the only choice?" but Juicy's delay becomes relative immobility of a character for whom we have great sympathy. Juicy deserves a reward and some happiness, but those are only faintly implied.
EXTRA
Click to view the Austin Playhouse program for Fat Ham
Fat Ham
by James Ijames
Austin Playhouse
June 6 - 29 2025
Austin Playhouse west campus
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