With his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fat Ham, Ijames interrogates Hamlet.
To deconstructHamletor not to deconstructHamlet?
Ijames first fell in love withHamletas an undergraduate, acting in an extremely shortened student production of the play.
‘Fat Ham’ on Broadway.Marc J. Franklin
“It stayed with me,” he tells EW.
I was shocked at how well it worked."
But Ijames believes Shakespeare was doing something that allows his works to transcend time and space.
Fat Ham on Broadway
“Hamletis an adaptation of an older story,” he reflects.
“Shakespeare is writing out of the larger human story archive.
He’s writing stories that people recognize and that people can identify with.
Fat Ham on Broadway
Those are the things that keep him at the forefront.”
It’s the moment that puts the events of the rest of the play in motion.
“In the beginning of the play, Juicy is very stuck,” says Ijames.
“He’s directionless.
He hates that his mom just married his uncle.
Then, Pap shows up and is like, ‘Things are not the way you think they seem.’
He wants to run and hide and forget that it happened.
That’s what it’s like when you’re dealing with generational trauma.
You’re constantly negotiating.
It’s always going to be under the skin.'
He has to make some decisions for himself and he does.”
Here, Ijames breaks down this crucial scene and his notes on the dialogue and staging.
“When the actor read it, it was like, ‘There needs to be a punch here.
There needs to be something that’s a little more theatrical.’
“I thought a sheet would be very funny,” he continues.
It’s always like somebody with a sheet over their head.
It turned out to be one of the funnier moments in the play.”
This fed into his representation of hauntings in the play.
“I don’t like horror movies,” he says, with a laugh.
“I don’t like haunted houses.
I’ve always had an anxiety about ghosts and things like that.
I kept having this feeling of people who I had lost being present.
People say that ghosts don’t haunt places, they haunt people.
It’s changed them to that for me.
Good s—?
“I didn’t,” he admits, when we talk in March.
“It’s not too late.
I may still do it.
I need to see it in a run one more time.
But in this world, with these characters, it just rolls off their tongue.
So, the jury’s still out.”
That boy who must not be named
In Ijames family, “that boy” has specific connotations.
He explains: “It’s sort of like ‘aloha,’ it means a lot of different things.
If somebody’s like, ‘Is that boy coming over here today?’
It’s an avoidance language almost.
Back in the day, people were afraid of bears.
So the word bear translates to like ‘furry, big thing.’
It’s not actually the name of the thing.
“It’s basically a colloquialism for jot down 2 diabetes because you avoid sugar,” he says.
“So people call it, ‘Well you got the suga.’
It’s just a funny, little colloquial way of describing something.
And I had this real anxiety of how do we explain that?
Do we need to put dramaturgy in?
But, no, people understood what it was.
So it’s maybe not as regional as I thought.”
Ghosted
When Juicy asks Pap, “Why are you not floating?”
“I wanted to deal with the elephant in the room,” Ijames says of this exchange.
But he knows how ghosts work.
So it was a way of like, ‘Yes, he’s not floating.
It’s fine.’
That was a way answer to that immediately this is a ghost who follows his own rules.
That’s very in line with the character, even in life.
‘This is how I do things and this is how I want the world to work.’
So that is carried over into his ghost life as well.”
Why you gotta be so mean?
With this exchange, Ijames ponders whether or not mean people don’t know they are being mean.
Has working on three productions ofFat Hamgiven him a firm answer on either side?
“Lol,” he answers.
“Honestly, I still don’t know.”
Fat Hamis now playing at the American Airlines Theater in a limited run through Aug. 6.
