Fat Ham - Oregon Shakespeare Festival

March 11 – June 27, 2025 Thomas Theatre

Suitability and Accessibility Director’s Notes Creative Team Cast The Venue Education Events

A Southern-fried take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet

In James Ijames’s sizzling cookout comedy, the grill isn’t the only thing turning up the heat. This deliciously funny play follows Juicy, a queer Black kid living in the South. When the ghost of his dead father appears at a family BBQ demanding revenge for his murder, Juicy must grapple with the decision to heed his phantom father’s advice or remain true to himself. The 2022 Pulitzer Prize–winning riff on Shakespeare’s Hamlet is directed by Elizabeth Carter, the 2021 SDCF Lloyd Richards New Futures Resident Artist and the assistant director of OSF’s 2022 production of August Wilson’s How I Learned What I Learned.

Fat Ham is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc. www.concordtheatricals.com

Approximate running time: 90 minutes, with no intermission.

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Suitability Suggestions

A comedic adaptation of Hamlet, this 2022 Pulitzer Prize–winning play about family drama at a barbeque/wedding reception includes discussions of pornography, sex, and masturbation. Profanity and the “n-word” (spoken by characters of color) are used in dialogue. Violence is discussed, including murder, and a character is punched in the stomach onstage. Due to the mature content in the play, it may be best suited to high school ages and up.

Accessibility

The Thomas Theatre is outfitted with an elevator to the theatre level.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is committed to accessibility. We recognize the needs of persons with disabilities and strive to make our facilities and productions accessible to all. Please visit our Accessibility page for details about 2025 programs and services as they develop.

A person in a patterned sweater smiles at the camera while sitting at a long table. Others around them are focused on their work or conversation.

View rehearsal photo gallery.

Director’s Notes

I fell in love with Fat Ham from the first time I read it. I immediately knew these people!

I keep thinking about betrayal. How do we betray ourselves? Betray the stories our families have of us, betray the demand of revenge from a dead father, betray the story? Betray Shakespeare. Family can be a gift and a curse. They’re complicated. We love them even when we want to escape them. In some ways they see everything about us, and in some ways they see nothing at all. Are we beholden to someone else’s narrative of us?

It’s so Shakespearean. James Ijames’s very clever take on Hamlet flips it on its head. “Sometimes you can’t laugh for crying,” my aunt used to say. Humor can be a healing technology. We joke and tease about things we don’t quite know how to process. When you feel you are boxed in by family or society, sometimes all you can do is poke a hole in it and exorcise it with humor. We collectively gather and pull out the darkness into the light in order to metabolize and transform it.

Here Juicy, our Hamlet, is a young Black queer kid who is trying to live, make a way forward, to survive. But the spectre of his father’s violence and need for revenge is throwing Juicy’s whole world off, forcing him to figure out how to stay true to himself in the face of some heavy intergenerational trauma. He is fighting to live.

But . . . it’s a BBQ! His mother just got married and we are supposed to be having fun, right?! Not bring up the ghosts of our past and present. Not upset your mother, who loves you. Not while we’re eating pulled pork?! But the choices get smaller and smaller for Juicy. Can he break out of this world that won’t let him be? Can he bring others with him?

“What if you imagine the world differently?” says Tio.

Maybe we can break the cycle and live fully as our true selves. Maybe queerness will save us all? Or at least move us forward . . .

—Elizabeth Carter