Ijames, James

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    ‘Good Bones’ Review: A Gentrification Drama at Public Theater

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    A new play from James Ijames, who won a Pulitzer for his “Fat Ham,” has intriguing ideas about identity and community that never fully take shape.In the immortal words of Joni Mitchell, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” In James Ijames’s “Good Bones,” which opened on Tuesday at the Public Theater in Manhattan, it’s not a parking lot that’s the issue but a sports complex. This project is being nudged along by Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson), a former local who is promoting the arena and building a luxe new home in her old hood as a way to revitalize it.Still, “Joni Mitchell never lies,” at least according to Earl (Khris Davis), the contractor working on Aisha’s house. Earl has fond memories of the housing project (in an unspecified city) known to its residents as the Heat. Aisha doesn’t; she sees the Heat as a place of fear, crime and lost prospects, and doesn’t mourn its potential replacement. Now, with her husband, Travis (Mamoudou Athie), she has returned to help transform the Heat into the up-and-coming neighborhood of Fennbrook. Oh, but their fabulous home may be haunted.“Good Bones” has great foundations: It’s a play about property and community exclusively featuring Black characters, and Black characters from different ends of the economic spectrum. How often do we see stories featuring the gentrified and the gentrifiers, all of whom are the same skin color? But “Good Bones” is meager with its plot and noncommittal in its intrigue, so even when the play offers its wry charms and astute reflections, it feels largely stuck in place.This production, directed by Saheem Ali, opens with a Brontë vibe; Aisha wanders in a shift dress through her in-progress modern mansion, with plastic sheets draping down from the high ceilings so the characters move through a haze of construction material. (Don’t worry, the sheets are gradually ripped down throughout the play to expose an Ikea showcase-worthy kitchen and dining room, beautifully designed by Maruti Evans.) The follow-through is a little less impressive.There’s an argument about kitchen knobs (Travis wants the handcrafted $40 ones; Aisha wants to stick to their budget) and whether they should have kids. Earl brings his sister Carmen (Téa Guarino) over for dinner. Occasionally Aisha hears a ghoulish giggle or watches her French doors spookily open on their own. But even our protagonist comically shrugs off these humble hauntings. (“I ain’t got time for this,” she snaps, turning on her heel.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On City Strolls, ‘Fat Ham’ Writer Was Inspired by ‘Ghosts of Absence’

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      The Tower Records on Broad Street, the Borders bookstore on Chestnut, and the Kitchen Kapers boutique at the corner of Walnut and 17th Streets in Philadelphia: The playwright James Ijames shopped at all of them in the early 2000s while pursuing his M.F.A. at Temple University.I frequented them as well, in the late 1990s, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. During a walk around downtown Philadelphia on a sweltering August afternoon, we noticed that those businesses were long gone. Passing by the buildings that once housed them, we reflected on how those old haunts endure, in some way, because they stay in our memories, paralleling many of the ideas of that lingering generational history Ijames gets at in his work.Our small talk — about our fondness for the city, receiving Pulitzer Prizes the same year (in 2022) and being college professors — gave way to weightier issues: gentrification, ghosts and intergenerational trauma. Those subjects are all explored in “Good Bones,” his much-anticipated follow-up to his Tony-nominated “Fat Ham,” a Pulitzer winner about a Hamlet-inspired character’s struggles to overcome his family’s cycles of trauma and violence.The cast of “Fat Ham” during its Tony-nominated Broadway run in 2023.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIjames (pronounced “imes”) still lives in Philadelphia, with his husband, and teaches at Villanova University. (He is also a former co-artistic director of that city’s Wilma Theater, which produced a film version of “Fat Ham” in 2021, before the Public Theater in Manhattan staged the play’s in-person premiere in 2022.) As we stood on the corner of 15th and Locust Streets, he pointed out that his favorite video store is now a plastic surgery center.“I loved TLA Video because they carried queer independent films, like ‘The Watermelon Woman.’ It was the only place I could find that stuff,” Ijames said. “I’m sad that there isn’t a place for a little queer boy to go.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Broadway Rebounds, ‘Some Like It Hot’ Gets 13 Tony Nominations

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      As Broadway’s rebound from the pandemic shutdown picks up pace, Tony nominators showered much-sought attention on a wide variety of shows, from razzle-dazzle spectacles to quirky adventurous fare.“Some Like It Hot,” a musical based on the classic Billy Wilder film about two musicians who witness a gangland slaying and dress as women to escape the mob, scored the most nominations: 13. But it faces stiff competition in the race for best new musical — ticket buyers have not made any of the contenders a slam-dunk hit, and there does not appear to be a consensus among the industry insiders who make up the Tony voting pool.Three other musicals picked up nine nominations apiece: “& Juliet,” which combines pop songs with an alternative narrative arc for Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers; “New York, New York,” a dance-driven show about a pair of young musicians seeking success and love in a postwar city; and “Shucked,” a pun-laden country comedy about a rural community facing a corn crisis. “Kimberly Akimbo,” a critical favorite about a high school student with a life-altering genetic condition and a criminally dysfunctional family, picked up eight nominations.The Tony nominations also feature plenty of boldfaced names. Among the stars from the worlds of pop music, film and television who earned nods are Sara Bareilles, Jessica Chastain, Jodie Comer, Josh Groban, Sean Hayes, Samuel L. Jackson, Wendell Pierce and Ben Platt. Another went to one of Broadway’s most-admired stars: Audra McDonald, who, with nine previous nominations and six wins, has won the most competitive Tony Awards of any performer in history.The musical “Shucked,” the rare Broadway show about corn, got nine nominations. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s Tony Awards come at the end of the first full-length season since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close for about a year and a half. Given that tourism remains below prepandemic levels, many workers have not returned to Midtown offices, and inflation has made producing far more expensive, the season has been surprisingly robust, with a wide range of offerings.“Entertainment is like food — sometimes you’re in the mood for an organic small plate, and sometimes for a burger and fries, and the best thing about New York is we’ve got the variety,” said Victoria Clark, the Tony-nominated star of “Kimberly Akimbo.”Broadway shows this season had grossed $1.48 billion as of April 30, according to figures released Tuesday by the Broadway League. That’s nearly double the grosses at the same point last season — $751 million — but lower than the $1.72 billion at the same point in 2019, during the last full prepandemic season.Other key metrics are better, too: 11.5 million seats have been filled on Broadway this season, compared with 6 million at the same point last season, but still down from the 13.8 million that had been filled by this point in 2019.The Tony nominations, which were chosen by a panel of 40 theater industry experts who saw all 38 eligible shows and have no financial interest in any of them, are particularly important to shows that are still running, which try to use the vote of confidence to woo potential ticket buyers.“It’s all about what’s going to make a show run longer and create more jobs for more people,” said Casey Nicholaw, the director and choreographer of “Some Like It Hot.” “Hopefully we’ll sell more tickets, and the show will be more of a success.”The Tony nominations can also boost the employment prospects, and the compensation, of artists. And, of course, they are a tribute to excellence. “It means something when your peers and your colleagues see beauty in something you make,” said James Ijames, whose play “Fat Ham” was among the nominated productions.“Between Riverside and Crazy” was among the nominees for best new play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway is a complicated place, dominated by commercial producers but also with six theaters run by nonprofits, and the work this season, as is often the case, featured everything from experimental plays tackling challenging subjects to more mainstream fare that aims primarily to entertain.Among the five nominees for best new play, three have already won the Pulitzer Prize in drama, including “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s story of a retired police officer trying to hang onto his apartment; “Cost of Living,” Martyna Majok’s exploration of caregiving and disability; and “Fat Ham,” Ijames’s riff on “Hamlet,” set in the North Carolina backyard of a family that runs a barbecue restaurant.The two other Tony-nominated plays are each significant in their own ways: “Leopoldstadt” is Tom Stoppard’s autobiographically inspired drama about a European Jewish family before, during and after World War II, while “Ain’t No Mo’” is Jordan E. Cooper’s outlandish comedy imagining that the United States offers its Black residents one-way tickets to Africa.The nominations for “Ain’t No Mo’” were especially striking given that the show struggled to find an audience and closed early. “I’m just so elated, I can barely find the words,” said Cooper, who was nominated both as writer and actor. “There was a lot of turbulence, but we landed the plane.”Stoppard is already the winningest playwright in Broadway history, having won Tony Awards for four previous plays (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia”). He is now 85 years old, and “Leopoldstadt” is his 19th production on Broadway. Stoppard said he was proud of the nomination, but sorry the play had come to seem so timely at a moment of rising concern about antisemitism.“Nobody wants society to be divided,” he said in an interview, “and I like to think ‘Leopoldstadt’ works against a sense of human beings dividing up and confronting each other.”Jordan E. Cooper in his comedy “Ain’t No Mo’,” which was nominated for best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOf the 38 Tony-eligible plays and musicals this season, 27 scored at least one nomination, leaving 11 with no nods. Among the musicals snubbed by the nominators were “Bad Cinderella,” the critically drubbed new musical from one of the most successful musical theater composers of all time, Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as a progressive rethink of “1776,” about the debate over the Declaration of Independence, which was revived with a cast of women, nonbinary and transgender performers.One of the musicals that did not score any nominations, a revival of “Dancin’,” quickly declared plans to close: A little more than nine hours after the Tony nominations were announced, the revue’s producers said its last performance would be May 14. Among the seven plays shut out was “The Thanksgiving Play,” which is thought to be the first work on Broadway by a female Native American playwright, Larissa FastHorse.The season featured shows examining a wide variety of diverse stories, and the nominations reflect that.At a time when gender identity issues have become increasingly politicized in the nation, nominations were earned by two gender nonconforming actors: J. Harrison Ghee, a star of “Some Like It Hot,” and Alex Newell, a supporting actor in “Shucked.”Helen Park, who is the first Asian American female composer on Broadway, was nominated in the best score category for the musical “KPOP.” “The more authentic we are to our respective cultures and stories,” she said, “the richer the Broadway soundscape and Broadway landscape will be.”Five plays by Black writers were nominated in either the best play or best play revival category, and four of the five nominees for leading actor in a play are Black.“I broke down in tears,” Pierce said about learning that he was among those nominees, for playing Willy Loman in a revival of “Death of a Salesman” in which the traditionally white Loman family is now African American. “I did not know how profoundly moving it would be. It was the culmination of years of hard work and a reflection on how much effort and toil went into the challenge of playing the role.”This was a strong season for musical revivals, and the nominated shows include two with scores by Stephen Sondheim — “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd” — as well as the Golden Age classic “Camelot” and “Parade,” which is a show about the early 20th-century lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia.“Into the Woods” was one of two Stephen Sondheim revivals to earn nominations.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“We’re so happy audiences are taking to it, and we hope that Sondheim would be happy this morning as well,” said Groban, starring as the title character in “Sweeney Todd.”The nominated play revivals are also a compelling bunch: a hypnotically minimalist version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” adapted by Amy Herzog and starring Chastain as a Norwegian debtor trapped in a sexist marriage; a bracing production of Suzan Lori-Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” about two brothers ominously named Lincoln and Booth; a rare staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” featuring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan; and a ghostly performance of “The Piano Lesson,” August Wilson’s classic drama about a family wrestling with the meaning, and monetary value, of an heirloom.The 769 Tony voters now have until early June to catch up on shows they have not yet seen before they cast their electronic ballots. The awards ceremony itself will be held on June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in a ceremony hosted by Ariana DeBose.Julia Jacobs More

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      Review: Skewering Masculinity, in a Hot and Sizzling ‘Fat Ham’

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      A modern gloss on “Hamlet” set at a backyard barbecue remakes the tragedy as a comedy, and as a challenge for today.What might life be like if we chose pleasure over harm?So a young man wonders near the end of “Fat Ham,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by James Ijames that opened on Broadway on Wednesday, at the American Airlines Theater. Keep in mind that the young man, Tio, is stoned to the gills when he dreams this philosophy.Still, in his world as in our own, the question of harm, and self-harm, is a serious one. You might even say it’s a classic, having found its most famous expression four centuries ago in “Hamlet,” without benefit (as far as we know) of weed.If Tio is a gloss on that play’s Horatio — a loyal, hearty friend to the main character — he’s also a transformation of the template for today: laid-back and open to anything. In his dream, he says, he’s been pleasured by a gingerbread man, even though he usually prefers the “gingerbread ladies.”In the same way, “Fat Ham” is a gloss on “Hamlet” — and the best kind of challenge to it, asking the same questions but coming up with different answers. That it is a raucous domestic comedy instead of a palace blood bath (and in Saheem Ali’s production, a nonstop pleasure in itself) means that despite the enduring belligerence of mankind, and especially of men, it sees a way out.That way out is softness. The Hamlet figure, Juicy (Marcel Spears), is a “thicc” Black mama’s boy ambivalently mourning the murder of his father and suffering from what Tio (Chris Herbie Holland) diagnoses as inherited trauma. “Your Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail and what’s before that?” he asks. “Slavery.”But Juicy’s melancholy has a more immediate source. Within a week of the death of his father, called Pap, his mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), has remarried — and to no less a bully than Pap’s brother, Rev. On the day of the wedding, Pap’s ghost arrives, under a gingham tablecloth, to pin the crime on Rev and spur Juicy to revenge. (Both Pap and Rev are played by Billy Eugene Jones.) Yet whether considering murder or suicide, Juicy, like Hamlet, waffles.You don’t need to make any of those “Hamlet” connections to enjoy “Fat Ham,” because the parallels are not as telling as the divergences.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKilling is not news to this crowd: Pap was in jail for shanking a cook at the family’s barbecue restaurant. And Rev struts his dominance during a backyard party at which the play’s action takes place by stoking the smoker with fresh hunks of pig. He doesn’t treat his nephew, now stepson, much better. “You pansy,” he calls Juicy, who thinks of himself as an empath. “Girly ass puddle of spit.” He then makes Tedra explain how they’ve spent his online-college tuition on a bathroom makeover.“Fat Ham” is certainly clever in its parallels with “Hamlet”: The barbecue is a neat translation of the “funeral baked meats” with which Gertrude and her new husband “did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” The melancholy prince’s ploy to prove Rev’s guilt is no longer a play wherein to “catch the conscience of the king” but a game of charades. Sententious Polonius is now a church lady, Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas); her children are Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) and Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) instead of Ophelia and Laertes.But you don’t need to make any of those “Hamlet” connections to enjoy “Fat Ham,” because the parallels are not as telling as the divergences. It is in the relationship between Larry and Juicy that Ijames most directly and movingly addresses the cycles of male violence, seeing in the damage done to individuals the disasters of the world.In that sense, it’s telling that Larry is a Marine, living at attention, possibly suffering from post-traumatic stress. His dialogue is mostly obedient monosyllables until it flowers with feeling when talking to Juicy. Though their scenes of aching tenderness do lead to a physical confrontation — “Fat Ham” is based on a tragedy, after all — it is no fatal sword fight; they both discover that confrontation can be a means of breaking open, not just breaking.And so it goes with Juicy and Tedra, Opal and Rabby, Tio and the gingerbread man. All must learn to accept love as offered, not as imagined, and to reject love, like Rev’s, that is not really love.That “Fat Ham” achieves its happy, even joyful, ending honestly, without denying the weight of forces that make “Hamlet” feel just as honest, is a sign of how capacious and original the writing is, growing the skin of its own necessity instead of merely burrowing into Shakespeare’s. It’s also a sign of how beautifully the cast brings the writing to life.It is in the relationship between Larry and Juicy that Ijames most directly addresses the cycles of male violence, seeing in the damage done to individuals the disasters of the world, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEveryone is excellent, and Thomas’s loud-lady-in-the-pew-behind-you routine is flat-out hilarious. But Spears, with his minute calibrations of feyness and fierceness, holds the whole thing together. In his scenes with Crawford, especially one in which Tedra pleads with Juicy to hold it together — “you don’t get to go crazy” — he lets us see how a character creates and re-creates himself in real time.Despite its wit and speed, Ali’s beautifully contoured staging leaves plenty of room for such quiet, profound moments. It’s a wider-spectrum account and bigger, too, than the film version produced by the Wilma Theater in 2021 and the stage premiere at the Public Theater last year.By bigger I don’t just mean Maruti Evans’s Broadway-size set, with its Broadway-size surprises, or the — really, must we? — confetti cannon at the end. (At least what it shoots is the opposite of artillery.) The performances, too, are bigger, their frank acknowledgment of the audience more sustained and more integral.For we are also part of this story. Not just when Juicy soliloquizes across the proscenium or Tedra casts us some side-eye. It takes more than seven fictional characters to choose pleasure over harm in a way that’s meaningful beyond a play — though it helps that no one in “Fat Ham” dies an unnatural death. (In “Hamlet,” almost everyone does.) If we’re to rethink masculinity after centuries of experiencing it as a call to arms, we need to witness what that might look like.For me, seeing “Fat Ham,” even multiple times, thus remains a revelation and a balm. It does one of the most important things we ask of theater: to rehearse, as many times as necessary, better ways to be — instead of choosing not to.Fat HamThrough Aug. 6 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; fathambroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      They Invited Shakespeare to the Cookout. They Got ‘Fat Ham.’

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      The playwright James Ijames and the director Saheem Ali built a “Hamlet”-inspired play, opening in April on Broadway, around their artistic friendship.When James Ijames and Saheem Ali, the playwright and director of the Broadway-bound Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fat Ham,” talk about their projects, they do so in the kind of shorthand of longtime friends: incomplete sentences, phrases punctuated with laughs and a whole vocabulary of glances.It’s a frigid February day, and they have settled into a booth at the Library restaurant at the Public Theater. Ijames is a bit guarded — speaking carefully, his posture showing a certain reserve. Ali radiates energy — beaming as he listens to Ijames, occasionally tapping him on the arm in excitement.“We’re always, always, always ideating, always brainstorming,” Ali said. “It’s kind of wonderful.”Ijames gently contradicts Ali: “Yeah, I am not thinking about anything else.”“You just sent me a new draft —” Ali starts.“That was a while ago!” Ijames protests.“It was like two weeks ago!” Ali insists. Both of them crack up.The back-and-forth is a hallmark of the creative partnership that now finds them preparing to make their Broadway debuts with “Fat Ham,” a co-production of the National Black Theater and the Public Theater. When the show opens at the American Airlines Theater on April 12, it will be the first National Black Theater production to appear on Broadway and the only work by a Black playwright on Broadway this spring.“I remember we announced that we’re coming and then the climate really kind of shifted after that,” said Ali, 44, acutely aware of the commercial pressures that have left new stories by Black playwrights struggling to find staying power on Broadway. “What are we walking into?”A riff on “Hamlet” in the form of a Black family gathering in North Carolina, the story follows a college student named Juicy, who is stuck at a barbecue that doubles as a wedding celebration for his mother, Tedra, and her new husband, Rev, a pit master and the brother of Tedra’s recently deceased ex-husband. Juicy’s the sullen outcast; he’s gay, emotionally aware, intellectual and not the embodiment of Black manhood that Rev expects him to be. When the ghost of Juicy’s father appears, demanding Juicy avenge his wrongful killing at his brother’s hand, the “Hamlet” story commences.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The show’s world premiere, a filmed production for the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, was streamed digitally in 2021, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The play then had a critically acclaimed Off Broadway run in 2022 at the Public Theater. Just weeks before opening, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Ijames, 42, who grew up in North Carolina and lives in Philadelphia, where he is the co-artistic director of the Wilma, is known for his examinations of Blackness and how it has been shaped by our nation’s prejudices. He strikes right at the foundations, often drawing on what are now viewed as the hypocrisies of the heroes of U.S. history like Thomas Jefferson (in “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever”) and George and Martha Washington (in “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington”).Ijames’s first play for the National Black Theater, 2017’s “Kill Move Paradise,” imagines a waiting room in the afterlife where four young Black men are trying to understand their deaths.“He’s helping create a visible space for us to bear witness to the trauma, the pain, the amount of lost bodies, but also the amount of hope,” said Jonathan McCrory, the National Black Theater’s executive artistic director. “We needed that. We needed someone to help us rethink and re-articulate the space in which our grief was amalgamating.”It was also the show that brought Ijames and Ali together. Ali, who has since directed Jocelyn Bioh’s “Merry Wives” and a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s classic “Fires in the Mirror,” had attended a table read in 2016. Ijames remembers being drawn to how Ali spoke about the text and interacted with the actors.They didn’t have much face time beyond that first meeting, though Ijames and Ali texted and called each other. (“This was before Zoom” became popular, Ijames noted.) Opening night was the first time Ijames saw Ali’s staging of his work. He loved it, but decided that in the future he didn’t want to miss the chemistry that occurs when the playwright is actually in the room for the rehearsal process.When they decided to collaborate again, Ali and Ijames gravitated toward Shakespeare. Both had developed an interest in the flexibility of the text at an early age; each cited “Romeo and Juliet” as the play that un-ruffed and de-frilled Shakespeare for them, allowing them to see the different language, lives and cultural experiences that could be welcomed into the text. For Ali, it started with performing Shakespeare with his peers in Kenya, where he was born and raised. “It was malleable. It was playable. It was completely adaptable,” he said. “Coming to the States, Shakespeare is this other thing: mostly white people, very few people of color, and they speak a certain way.”He began inviting playwrights to work on Shakespeare adaptations with him. “I was like, ‘I want someone whose profession it is to work on the language. And I can talk about the world and the concept.’”Ijames had already been drafting something along those lines, working on what would become “Fat Ham” in 2017. He had picked his favorite Shakespeare play, “Hamlet,” forming the idea from King Claudius and Queen Gertrude’s wedding celebration in the second scene of the first act.Set at a North Carolina backyard barbecue, “Fat Ham” unpacks themes of homophobia and toxic masculinity in a blend of colloquial language and Shakespearean English.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I was like, ‘What if you could spill all of ‘Hamlet’ into that party, that celebration, and tell the whole story there? What would change? What ultimately would these people find out and explore about each other in that pressure cooker of time?’” Ijames said.The tragedy of “Fat Ham” is multifaceted, rooted not in murder and intrigue but in themes of homophobia, self-hatred and toxic masculinity. Ijames unpacks it all in a chili-and-cornbread combo of colloquial language and Shakespearean English, with characters that reflect an authentic Black experience.“Black people of the diaspora, in America, on the continent, anywhere else in the world — we speak with music, we speak with meter,” Ijames said. IN SPEAKING ABOUT building the show, Ali and Ijames described how they complemented and trusted each other. Ijames mentioned Ali’s transformation of the karaoke scene in “Fat Ham,” staging it with an otherworldly theatricality. The lights shift, the characters’ movements slow down and Ali infuses the scene with what Ijames calls a “physical vocabulary” — an unexpected choreographed sequence that includes metal-style headbanging. Ali noted his admiration for the spaces Ijames provides in the script for the director to extend his imagination. He cited the stage directions at the end, which begin, “The play cracks open.” What the audience sees is what the story evoked in Ali’s mind — and it’s a joyous, glamorous break from what audiences may have come to expect. In other words, a party.“Any time I get to collaborate with him I’m happy, because I don’t have to explain things to him,” Ijames said. “He just understands.”The word “trust” surfaces frequently among the show’s producers and cast members. “Lord knows Black folks endure a lot of contorting to fit in spaces that were not made for ourselves,” said Sade Lythcott, chief executive of the National Black Theater. “So trust becomes almost like the alchemy or the catalyst for how we can communicate to each other and build something as beautiful as ‘Fat Ham.’”Marcel Spears, who portrayed Juicy Off Broadway and is returning to the role, describes an almost psychic “synchronicity” between Ijames and Ali in the rehearsal room. “It’s like mom and dad,” he said.This will also be Spears’s first time on Broadway, and four other cast members are making their Broadway debuts as well. “Everybody’s walking into it with a sense of urgency and pride and joy,” he said.Still, “Fat Ham” faces a commercial environment that is challenging for new productions — especially plays by and about people of color. In the 2021-22 season, Broadway made history with the premiere of seven plays by Black playwrights. Yet many suffered financial losses (though not unusual for Broadway plays, particularly damning for work by already underrepresented artists) and a couple closed early, exacerbated by the surge in Omicron cases.“I’m shaking in my boots! Your boy is nervous,” Spears said with an anxious laugh. He mentioned a good friend, Jordan E. Cooper, the playwright and star of “Ain’t No Mo’,” and the early closing last fall of that show, which had a mostly Black creative team. “I was disheartened because as a Black theater artist, I want our work to be seen as just as valuable and as important and as immediate to Broadway audiences as anything else.”Lythcott, reflecting on those closures, said: “I think the way commercial theaters look at diversifying their audiences and appealing to culturally specific demographics, it still sometimes feels like Black folks are an idea and not living, breathing people. That’s the magic of James’s piece that he wrote: People can identify Tedra and Juicy; those are people that we know.”For his part, Ijames said he hopes that “Fat Ham” will attract a diverse, “game” New York audience who will enjoy what’s happening onstage. His expectations are those of an artist shaped by a scrappier regional theater scene: “We make the thing and then hopefully people come and hopefully it enlivens the community in which we’re making the thing. And so I hope that it’s going to do that. I hope that little stretch of 42nd Street is a little more Southern, a little more country.” More

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      ‘Fat Ham,’ a Pulitzer-Winning Riff on ‘Hamlet,’ Is Broadway-Bound

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      The play, by James Ijames, will be at the American Airlines Theater starting March 21.“Fat Ham,” a comedic and contemporary riff on “Hamlet” set in a backyard in the American South, will transfer to Broadway next spring, one year after winning the Pulitzer Prize in drama.The play, by James Ijames, is about a family that, like the royal family in Shakespeare’s story, centers on a lonely young college student unsettled by his mother’s decision to marry her dead husband’s brother. But in this version, Ijames seeks to use comedy and his own plot twists to challenge the cycle of violence. (Also, in this version, the family is Black, and the young man is gay.)The Pulitzer board described “Fat Ham” as “a funny, poignant play that deftly transposes ‘Hamlet’ to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility and honesty.”The play had an initial production online, at the height of the pandemic, filmed by the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where Ijames is one of three artistic directors. Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called the show “hilarious yet profound” and said “it is the rare takeoff that actually takes off — and then flies in its own smart direction.”The play then had a run earlier this year at the Public Theater in New York, co-produced by the National Black Theater. Maya Phillips, a critic-at-large for The Times, also praised the work, writing, “For all that Ijames dismantles in Shakespeare’s original text, he builds it back up into something that’s more — more tragic but also more joyous, more comedic, more political, more contemporary.”The Broadway production will feature the same cast as at the Public, directed by Saheem Ali, who is an associate artistic director at the Public, and starring Marcel Spears as the Hamlet figure, Juicy. The production is scheduled to begin previews March 21 and to open April 12 at the American Airlines Theater.“I feel really proud, and excited that it’s going to reach a larger audience,” Ijames said in an interview. “This play is for people who are looking for a new path, people who are trying to figure out how to talk to their family about difficult things, queer people who want to see their reflection, Black people who want to see their reflection, people who love Shakespeare and folks who have never seen a Shakespeare play. It’s for everyone.”Ijames said he has made some minor changes to the script for Broadway, but the more significant changes will be to the staging, as it shifts from an amphitheater-like setup at the Public to the more traditional proscenium theater at the American Airlines. Ali said he would seek to preserve the show’s sense of a communal gathering, as well as its elements of supernatural magic, as it moves to the larger venue.The show will be the first National Black Theater production to transfer to Broadway, and only the third play to transfer to Broadway from any Black theater, according to a news release.The show will also be the first produced by Public Theater Productions, which is a for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit Public Theater. Under that structure, the Public could make money if “Fat Ham” turns a profit, but the nonprofit has no liability if the show loses money, and no donor funds are involved. A similar financing structure has in the past been used by the Manhattan Theater Club, another prominent New York nonprofit.Also producing the show are Rashad V. Chambers, a talent manager who has previous producing credits on a number of Broadway shows, including “Topdog/Underdog,” and No Guarantees, which is the production company led by Christine Schwarzman, an intellectual-property lawyer who has also been actively investing in Broadway for several years. Although the American Airlines Theater is operated by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, “Fat Ham” is a commercial production; Roundabout will offer the show to its subscribers, but is not among the show’s producers.One unusual bit of trivia: “Fat Ham” will be the sixth Pulitzer Prize-winning play to open on Broadway this season, following “Cost of Living,” “Death of a Salesman,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Topdog/Underdog” and “Between Riverside and Crazy.” (Additionally, two Pulitzer-winning musicals that opened during previous seasons are currently running on Broadway: “Hamilton” and “A Strange Loop.”) More

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      ‘Raisin in the Sun’ and ‘The Harder They Come’ Part of Public Theater Season

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      Two new works by Suzan-Lori Parks will be included in a season that delves into “relationships between Black and white America.”The Public Theater’s 2022-23 season will feature a mix of works rooted in history and new pieces that speak to current cultural shifts — toward racial justice, equity and disability rights. The season kicks off with a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s bid to move into a house in a white neighborhood of Chicago, directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”). Performances are scheduled to begin Sept. 27.This is not O’Hara’s first interpretation of the classic: He also directed a version in 2019, starring S. Epatha Merkerson, at the Williamstown Theater Festival. (The Public Theater said this will be a new production, not a remounting of the Williamstown staging.) He is also a playwright (“Barbecue,” “Bootycandy”), and in 2010 he wrote his own sequel to Hansberry’s play, “The Etiquette of Vigilance.”The season will also include the New York premiere of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” — conceived by Greig Sargeant, and developed it as member of Elevator Repair Service, and directed by John Collins — starting Sept. 24. The play re-enacts a 1965 debate between the writer and civil rights advocate James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and an architect of the 20th-century conservative movement, for which they were asked if “the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” The show had its premiere last fall at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, said he wants to help put Hansberry and Baldwin “back at the center of our dramatic tradition.” Baldwin, a towering literary figure, found less success as a dramatist, partly because of the mostly white cultural gatekeepers of the ’60s and ’70s. Hansberry became the first Black woman to be produced on Broadway when “A Raisin in the Sun,” premiered there in 1959, but died just a few years later in 1965.“It’s absolutely vital for our understanding of this current moment, particularly in terms of relationships between Black and white America,” Eustis said in an interview. “It’s also saying, ‘Hey, Shakespeare isn’t the only classic voice that matters.’”The upcoming slate of shows balances lessons from the past with insights into the future of theater. The New York premiere of “Where We Belong,” by Madeline Sayet, a member of the Mohegan tribe, grapples with the legacy of Shakespeare and colonization. Mei Ann Teo will direct the show, which is being produced with Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in association with the Folger Shakespeare Library. Performances are set to begin Oct. 28.For Eustis, Sayet’s solo piece fits well into the current cultural movement. “It’s a wave that has picked us up and thrown us forward, and said, ‘It is time to really deal with the legacy of slavery,’” Eustis said. “‘It is time to really turn and fundamentally alter race relations in this country.’”Artists who have previously had works staged at the Public — like Suzan-Lori Parks, the theater’s writer in residence; James Ijames; and Erika Dickerson-Despenza — will return this season with new plays.Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” which will be staged in November, began as a collection of plays that the playwright wrote each day from March 2020 to April 2021. It will be followed by “The Harder They Come,” featuring Jimmy Cliff’s songs and a book by Parks, in the winter of 2023. The work is a new musical adaptation of the 1972 Perry Henzell film, about a young singer (played by Cliff) in Jamaica eager to become a star only to become an outlaw after being pushed to desperate circumstances. Tony Taccone will direct, with codirection by Sergio Trujillo, and choreography is by Edgar Godineaux.“That longevity of a relationship with a major artist is hugely important, not only to Suzan-Lori, but to making a statement to the field that it’s possible to spend a life in the theater,” Eustis said. “You can actually keep your feet in the theater and ground your whole career.”“Good Bones,” written by Ijames (who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for drama for “Fat Ham,” which is currently onstage at the Public in its New York premiere), will have its world premiere in the spring of 2023. The play, directed by Saheem Ali, explores gentrification and the growing price of the American dream. “Shadow/Land,” by Dickerson-Despenza (who won the Blackburn Prize for her play “Cullud Wattah”) and directed by Candis C. Jones, is the first installment of a 10-play cycle about the Hurricane Katrina diaspora. The Public produced it as an audio play during the pandemic. Performances also begin in spring 2023.Ryan J. Haddad will make his Off Broadway playwriting debut with “Dark Disabled Stories,” about strangers he encounters while navigating a city not built for cerebral palsy, in the winter of 2023. Jordan Fein is directing the play, produced by the Bushwick Starr and presented by the Public. It probes discrimination in favor of able-bodied people. More

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      ‘Fat Ham’ Review: Dismantling Shakespeare to Liberate a Gay Black ‘Hamlet’

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      James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set at a Southern barbecue, gets its first in-person production at the Public Theater.I could begin with the ghost. Or the famous existential question.But I’m not reviewing another run-of-the-mill adaptation of “Hamlet”; “Fat Ham,” James Ijames’s outstanding transformation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into a play about Black masculinity and queerness, both echoes “Hamlet” and finds a language beyond it.So I’ll start with a scene that especially evokes this production’s charms: In the middle of a backyard barbecue, a group of family members and friends sitting around a table covered with plates of ribs, corn on the cob and biscuits is suddenly bathed in a blue spotlight. They break out into an impressionistic dance (choreographed by Darrell Grand Moultrie), curling forward and arching backward in slow motion, arms fanning out, then they slump down into their seats and begin headbanging. All the while, our hero, Juicy (Marcel Spears), whom Ijames characterizes in his script as “a kinda Hamlet,” mournfully croons along to Radiohead’s “Creep.”This is Ijames’s tongue-in-cheek style of wit: Of course the melancholy prince would have sung “Creep” had Thom Yorke and his band been around in 17th-century England. Without undermining its drama, “Fat Ham” pokes fun at the theatricality of Hamlet’s anguish.And Saheem Ali, the director of “Fat Ham,” which opened on Thursday at the Public Theater in a co-presentation with the National Black Theater, can sure throw a party. By adding in the lights and movement, the scene takes on an increased flair. But then again, having directed the similarly vivacious “Merry Wives” at the Delacorte Theater and “Nollywood Dreams” at MCC Theater last year, Ali is at his best when given an occasion to celebrate Blackness.Marcel Spears (singing from the porch) mournfully crooning along to Radiohead’s “Creep.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJuicy knows about trauma — after all, he’s a gay Black man in North Carolina. But his more immediate concern is this barbecue, which is a wedding celebration for his mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), and his uncle Rev (Billy Eugene Jones), who have married just a week after the murder of Juicy’s father, Pap (also played by Jones). When Pap returns in a spiffy spectral form — crisp porcelain-white suit and shoes — to tell him that Rev orchestrated his murder, Juicy must decide whether he’ll seek revenge. And all this in the midst of a party also attended by his family friends, the judgmental Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas) and her adult kids, Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) and Larry (Calvin Leon Smith).Just a few weeks ago “Fat Ham” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama despite having never had an in-person production. In April 2021 the Wilma Theater released a filmed version of the play that my colleague Jesse Green wrote was “hilarious yet profound.” But perhaps that’s no surprise given it’s from the playwright of such critically acclaimed works as “Kill Move Paradise” and “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington.”So many playwrights and directors try to find the spaces in Shakespeare’s texts that they can squeeze into, strong-arming their personal sensibilities and contemporary politics into some of Shakespeare’s best-known speeches and scenes. Ijames does the opposite in “Fat Ham”; he steals the bones of the original and sloughs off the excess like the fatty bits on a slab of meat. He crafts his own story and then within it makes space for Shakespeare again.That’s to say that there is actual Shakespeare here, with Juicy slipping into Hamlet’s original language now and then. (Spears, who’s no stranger to classic Shakespeare roles, pulls on the old English comfortably, like an old pair of jeans, his line-reading colloquial and unfussed.) In fact, Ijames keenly grants everyone a level of meta-awareness. The effect is stunning, making the play a living text, moving between “Hamlet,” the story happening on the stage and the world beyond the fourth wall.“What you tell them?” more than one character asks Juicy — “them” being the audience. The assumption being that Juicy may mislead us, as if we don’t already know some version of this story and how it ends. “Fat Ham” uses that to its advantage, challenging our expectations of, say, Tedra, who isn’t shy about defending herself against the trope of the weak, unfaithful wife and irresponsible mother. At one point, she says of the audience: “They done already made up they minds about what I’m worth. What I get to feel. What I get to do.”Ijames also opts out of the Hamlet-Ophelia romance, instead making several of the traditionally straight characters gay. And Opal is not the fragile love-stricken girl in so many other “Hamlet” adaptations but strong and tough enough to throw down in a street fight.What would normally be a story about revenge instead becomes one about the toxic masculinity and homophobia that plague the Black community. “You was soft,” Rev says to Juicy with a sneer. “And the men in our family ain’t soft. And I started to think — look at this little pocket of nothing.”Just as “Hamlet” is full of humor, so too is “Fat Ham,” from Juicy’s deadpan sarcasm to Rev’s elaborately singsong sermon of a mealtime prayer. And Chris Herbie Holland as Tio (that’s Horatio), Juicy’s kooky cousin and best friend, shakes up every scene he’s in with raucous comedy.Tensions mount between Jones, left, leading a prayer as Rev, and Spears’s sarcastic Juicy.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Fat Ham” truly sings in the ensemble scenes, and Ali’s direction crackles in the many instances when there are overlapping jokes, remarks and barbs. If the comedy’s not in the script, then it’s in the controlled chaos, because the cast is talented, though they shine best when the action of the 90-minute show picks up. The pacing in the first few scenes could slow so the beauty of the language and characters don’t get lost in a monotonous tread. And the actors’ mostly mic-less performance occasionally suffers from their attempts to both emote and project; the volume erases much of the tonal modulation and dialogue pauses.Dominique Fawn Hill’s costume design adds another layer of character development: Rabby’s loud Barney-purple ensemble, with its flouncy hat, for the church-loving gossip queen; Juicy’s gloomy all-black ensemble of overalls and a mesh shirt; Tio’s “Goosebumps” T-shirt and coral zebra-print button-down with acid-washed embroidered jeans; and one resplendent explosion of colorful fabrics and accessories that will catch audiences off-guard, in the best way, at the end of the show.Maruti Evans’s smart scenic design — a maroon-red back porch on a thrust stage covered with AstroTurf, in front of a backdrop of the house — is just as vivid as the costumes and the playful lighting (by Stacey Derosier).For all that Ijames dismantles in Shakespeare’s original text, he builds it back up into something that’s more — more tragic but also more joyous, more comedic, more political, more contemporary. It dons the attributes of Shakespeare that make it classic. “To be or not to be” becomes a different kind of existential query. It’s not a question of life or death, but of who we can decide to be in a world that tries to define that for us: Can you be soft? Can you be queer? Can you be brave? Can you be honest?Fat HamThrough July 3 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      James Ijames on Winning a Pulitzer and Making ‘Hamlet’ a Comedy

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      The 41-year-old playwright’s show “Fat Ham,” set at a Southern barbecue, hasn’t even had an in-person production yet because of the pandemic.The play “Fat Ham,” a comedic riff on “Hamlet” set at a Southern barbecue, hasn’t even had an in-person production yet because of the coronavirus pandemic.But on Monday, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, based on its script and following a streaming production mounted last year by the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. And on Thursday, performances of the first production before live audiences are scheduled to begin Off Broadway at the Public Theater, in a coproduction with the National Black Theater.“Fat Ham” was written by James Ijames, 41, who grew up in Bessemer City, N.C., and was educated at Morehouse College and Temple University (he studied acting). He now lives in Philadelphia, where he is one of several co-artistic directors experimenting with a shared leadership model at the Wilma Theater; his other notable works include “Kill Move Paradise,” “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” and “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington.”About an hour after the Pulitzers were announced, I spoke to Ijames (his surname is pronounced “imes”) about the play and the award. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.From left, Kimberly S. Fairbanks, Brennen S. Malone and Lindsay Smiling in the Wilma Theater’s streaming production of “Fat Ham.”via The Wilma TheaterSo for those of our readers who have never heard of “Fat Ham,” what’s it about?“Fat Ham” is a very loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that has been transported to the American South, and it takes place in the backyard of a family that owns a barbecue restaurant. At its core, the play is about how this Hamlet character, whose name is Juicy, is meeting and undermining his family’s cycles of trauma and violence. It’s really about how he brings the rest of his family with him to that realization that they don’t have to continue these cycles of abuse and violence, and that they can do something completely different with their lives. It’s a comedy in the end, so I take “Hamlet” and I essentially make it not tragic anymore.Where did the idea come from?I just have always loved “Hamlet.” When I was in college, I did a truncated production of it. And the scene when we first meet Hamlet, in the court, I did that scene, and it was just like, “This is such a great scene. I think the whole play could exist inside of this moment. All of the players are in the same room together, and what if everything just erupted in this court in this moment, so the whole sweep of Hamlet was in one scene?” And I wanted to take that and bring it a little closer to my experience by putting it in the mouths of people that look like me and sound like me, that have my rhythms and eat the kind of food that I grew up eating. And I think it illuminates something about the original.Obviously, we’ve been living through a pretty unusual period, and you have won this prize after a virtual production. Tell me about that.We basically got Airbnbs and put all of the cast and the crew in a bubble, and they filmed it over the course of a month. It turned out really beautifully, and we were all really proud of it. And I’m really thrilled for people to see an in-person performance of it.How do you think the in-person experience will be different from the streaming experience?The actors can feed off of the reactions from the audience that they hear. So I’m really excited about having that experience. I also did a few tweaks on the play because it’s moved from the digital format to the live format. So I’m curious to see how that meets audiences.Why are you a playwright?When I was about 13, my parents split up and I had a lot of anger and frustration, and one of the ways that my family tried to encourage me to work through that was to write. And so I started writing little skits and plays, and I just have been writing in dramatic form ever since. I think it’s a way for me to metabolize all the things that I’m thinking about or curious about.The 2022 Pulitzer PrizesCard 1 of 12The awards. More