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.

Approximate running time: 90 minutes, with no intermission.

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

“Creep” written by Colin Charles Greenwood, Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood, Edward John O’Brien, Philip James Selway, Thomas Edward Yorke, Mike Hazelwood, and Albert Hammond. Used by permission of WC Music Corp. (ASCAP) and EMI April Music Inc. All rights reserved

The videotaping or making of electronic or other audio and/or visual recordings of this production and distributing recordings or streams in any medium, including the internet, is strictly prohibited, a violation of the author(s)’s right and actionable under United States copyright law. For more information, please visit: https://concordtheatricals.com/resources/protecting-artists.

New York Premiere Co-Production by The Public Theater (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Patrick Willingham, Executive Director) and National Black Theatre (Sade Lythcott, Chief Executive Officer; Jonathan McCrory, Executive Artistic Director).

Fat Ham was commissioned by and received its World Premiere as a filmed production at The Wilma Theater, Philadelphia (Blanka Zizka, Yury Urnov, James Ijames, and Morgan Green, Co-Artistic Directors; Leigh Goldenberg, Managing Director).

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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 comic sounds, gestures, and simulation of sexual acts. Profanity and the “n-word” (spoken by characters of color) are used in dialogue. Violence is present in multiple forms including abrupt physical violence and graphic descriptions. Due to the mature content in the play, it may be best suited to high school ages and up.

For additional content warnings regarding violence or graphic depictions that may be upsetting to some audience members, please see our Content Warnings page (may contain spoilers).

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.

Production Photos

Two people laugh and shake hands near a house decorated with balloons and a “Congrats Grad” sign.

Two people stand in front of a grill, smiling and appearing mid-laugh during a lighthearted moment.

A group of people strikes expressive poses under dramatic blue lighting, one standing on a picnic table with an arm raised.

A person stands alone, partially lit, with one arm stretched forward while wearing a shirt that reads “Future King.”

A person in a bright red suit and hat sits calmly at a picnic table covered in a pink heart-themed tablecloth, while others bustle around during an outdoor party scene.

A person in sunglasses and a colorful shirt lounges across a picnic table, pointing and smiling under party lights.

A person in a military uniform speaks emotionally to others surrounding them in a tense theatrical moment.

Under dramatic red lighting, a person in a puff-sleeve dress stands in a defensive stance while others react around them in a chaotic backyard scene.

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