Evaluation: ‘Fat Ham’ at the Geffen Playhouse slathers barbecue sauce on ‘Hamlet” for scrumptious comedy

“Fat Ham,” James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, invites theatergoers to a yard cookout in the American South. On the menu is William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” smothered in barbecue sauce.

Choose my phrase for it: You are going to want seconds. A comedy with critical tragic company on its mind, “Fat Ham” is the most gripping theatrical supplying at the Geffen Playhouse due to the fact Matthew López’s epic gay drama “The Inheritance” and the most boisterously outrageous since Robert O’Hara’s “Barbecue.”

Ijames (pronounced I’ms) relocates the motion from the rotten state of Denmark to a domestic setting where by a little something doesn’t scent right. Juicy (a glorious Marcel Spears), a Black queer pupil at a for-profit on the net university, life with his mother, Tedra (a sensational Nikki Crawford), whose new spouse has just moved into their residence. The household isn’t major enough for the 3 of them.

Like Hamlet, Juicy is mourning the latest dying of his father, Pap (Billy Eugene Jones). They weren’t near. Pap, who was killed in jail, had a violent temper. But the bond in between a father and a son cannot be dismissed. When Pap’s ghost crashes the barbecue to demand from customers that Juicy avenge his murder, Juicy does not want a PhD in Renaissance drama to know he has a problem on his fingers.

The murderer, of class, is Pap’s brother, Rev (Jones doing double duty), who has just designed his sister-in-law, Tedra, his bride. Much more than kin and significantly less than type, Rev straight away begins menacing Juicy with needling comments and unveiled threats.

Rev phone calls Juicy “soft” and, under the guise of toughening him up, knocks him down with a punch. But Juicy is the strongest character in the participate in. An ironic observer with an unbending will, he prefers the tranquil independence of his have views to the intense clamor of these about him who mistakenly imagine they can management how he thinks.

Structured like an improvisational jazz riff on Shakespeare, “Fat Ham” would make existential music out of riotous domestic bickering. Familiarity is claimed to breed contempt. In this article, claustrophobic proximity spawns sardonic hilarity.

Juicy is habituated to the insanity of his mom. Brazen and unruly, Tedra is a sensual handful, grinding to the audio just one moment, instructing her son the tricks of how to keep onto a gentleman the subsequent. When craziness erupts, Tedra’s very first instinct is to crank up the quantity.

The engage in commences with Tio (Chris Herbie Holland), Juicy’s cousin, seeing porn on his cell phone and displaying off his have acrobatic moves. Juicy averts his eyes, but the two younger guys are tight, not in contrast to Hamlet and Horatio — if Only Admirers ended up all around when Shakespeare was producing.

Getting dealt with a single tyrannical, homophobic father, Juicy is not well prepared to acknowledge a further. But is he able of murdering his uncle? The problem haunts Juicy as he tries to convert his pout into a smile for the friends and not be the killjoy his stepfather accuses him of becoming.

The party will get underway when a different relatives, as loudly dysfunctional as Juicy’s, arrives with coated dishes. Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas), dressed in her churchgoing best, is accompanied by her two developed children: Opal (Adrianna Mitchell), squirming in a girly costume that her mom built her don, and Larry (Matthew Elijah Webb), household from the war in his military services uniform.

Juicy’s interactions with Opal, his previous pal who equally refuses to conform to gender anticipations, and straight-backed Larry, who has a solution tenderness for Juicy, are revealing. Ijames is not just riffing on “Hamlet” — he’s queering the participate in.

Opal and Larry, the Ophelia and Laertes of “Fat Ham,” convey to the fore issues of gender expression and sexual autonomy and acceptance that feed right into the comedy’s most profound philosophical worry: How a lot liberty do we have to figure out our destiny in a world in which cycles of violence and centuries of systemic oppression foreclose paths and limit options?

In the meantime, ribs are devoured, beer is guzzled and, when conflict ratchets up, photographs are thrown back. A karaoke equipment is introduced out to liven things up. Tedra extra or much less pole-dances to a Crystal Waters dance blend Juicy sings broodingly to Radiohead. A match of charades, which serves as a substitute for the perform-in-a-engage in, exposes Rev’s guilt as efficiently as “The Mousetrap” catches the conscience of the king in “Hamlet.”

But never mistake the raucousness for shallowness. Tio may well occur off like a joker, but he flashes sociological insights that connect the play’s various thematic strands. “That was way deeper than I was expecting,” Juicy suggests, right after Tio lays down some truths about the inherited trauma of generational incarceration.

Rev (Billy Eugene Jones) addresses spouse and children customers gathered for a barbecue in “Fat Ham.”

(Jeff Lorch)

Sideeq Heard’s path follows the system of Saheem Ali’s 2022 manufacturing at the New York General public Theater that transferred to Broadway the subsequent calendar year. (The engage in gained its environment premiere in 2021 as a filmed manufacturing at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia.) The ensemble for this West Coast premiere contains all but 1 of the initial New York solid members. The performances are vibrantly drawn, although the staging was significantly less precise at Thursday’s opening night time overall performance.

Maruti Evans’ backyard established would seem a bit cramped on the Geffen Playhouse phase. But there have been other complications. The energized viewers, keen to converse again to the people, disrupted the performers’ timing. And then a slight professional medical mishap backstage brought on the production to be halted for about 10 minutes.

In a single of his direct deal with soliloquies just after the show resumed, Spears prefaced Juicy’s words by inquiring that any critics in the dwelling consider notice of the gusto with which the actors ongoing their performances immediately after the unpredicted interruption. The cast was heroic but understandably rattled. Some stage small business, including a important moment of violence amongst Juicy and Larry, was sloppily executed.

Spears’ portrayal of Juicy, having said that, is remarkable throughout. His balancing of deadpan wit and deep melancholy captures the play’s tonal spirit perfectly. Like Hamlet, Juicy does not usually behave in an exemplary fashion. Drowning in submit-traumatic dejection, he once in a while falls brief of his have higher specifications. But his compassionate intelligence is so luminous and his struggling so relatable that we forgive him his sins as we hope our have shortcomings will be forgiven.

“Fat Ham” does not flinch from the harshness in between intolerant dad and mom and their queer children. But it is just as curious about the special bond concerning a gay son and his larger-than-lifetime mom. Juicy loves Tedra not in the Freudian way of hackneyed “Hamlet” productions but in the protective way of an outcast who needs to protect his fantastic mom from the blows of existence.

Juicy desires his mom to be secure, very well and satisfied. He sticks all around for the reason that he’s worried of what could possibly occur to her if he leaves. “Are you delighted?” he asks with a major heart. When she responses, “What’s delighted?” he mournfully replies, “Oh, momma.”

If this simple exchange is one particular of the most touching moments in the participate in, it’s mainly because Spears and Crawford have designed these kinds of a fully dimensional marriage. She by no means stops caring for him even when she helplessly submits to the brutality of another gentleman. And Juicy in no way condemns her even right after he finds out that she enable Rev expend his tuition funds on a cosmetic toilet renovation.

In reminding us that we’re not the sum of our errors, Ijames asks us to take into consideration what our lives would be like if we would choose, in Tio’s text, “pleasure above hurt.” “Fat Ham” techniques what it preaches by lavishing laughter and delight as it encourages us to consider our destinies caressingly in hand.