A Charming, Unexpected Take on Shakespeare
Review of Fat Ham at Seattle Repertory Theatre
Written by Hypnos Jimenez during an Arts Criticism workshop at Evergreen High School
Fat Ham at the Seattle Rep is a wonderful performance that creates a conversation with the audience about self expression, identity, expectations, and above all else takes immense joy in having fun with the audience. From the set work to the actors’ physical performance, a sense of excitement and festivity is present through the entire play. Although it is very different from its source material of Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Fat Ham does keep a condensed form of the original’s structure, using it to orient the audience and smoothly establish the play’s characters, plot, and where it differs. The play opens with Juicy (the analog to prince Hamlet) and Tio (the analog to Horatio and Juicy’s cousin) decorating for the party celebrating the marriage of Juicy’s mother, Tedra to his uncle, Rev, which will be the setting for the rest of the play.
Throughout the performance, the cast and especially Juicy, will address or acknowledge the audience, the Shakespearean origins of the play, and the expectations the audience has from those origins. Early on, Juicy will quote lines from Hamlet to demonstrate how he is more studied and introspective than those around him and this evolves later into one of multiple fourth wall breaks, where Juicy stops the play and quotes one of Hamlet’s famous soliloquies in its entirety to the audience. This element of the play can be seen as clunky or gratuitous, but it’s a functional way to integrate Hamlet into its shortened structure and lighter self-referential tone.
The show’s director, Timothy McCuen Piggee said in an interview for the Seattle Rep; “the questions I have about both Fat Ham and Hamlet are, what obligations do children owe their parents? When does a child manifest the autonomy of being their own person?” Every character, parent and child, connects to this in some way. Larry (Laertes in the original Hamlet) and Opal (Ophelia) both live under the pressure of their mother Rabby’s (Polonius) firm expectations of who they should be. Larry tries his best to adhere to those expectations to please his mother and those around him, acting the part of a tough military man and hiding his desire to “be soft” and his attraction to men. Opal, meanwhile, simply tries to avoid these expectations, being confident in who she is and what she likes but following what her mom tells her to appease her and out of respect.
Juicy, of course, has to grapple with whether he can commit the revenge that his father Pap’s ghost expects of him and kill his uncle. At the same time he struggles with parallel expectations from his mother and uncle, who belittle his goal of going through college and expect him to be more tough and masculine like other men in his family. In contrast to the other young people in the play, Tio has no parental figure seen on stage and thus lacks any direct expectations placed on him. This gives the audience a comic relief character less burdened by emotion than the rest of the cast, but also a character who freely expresses and explores their thoughts and identity and helps guide the other characters to allow themselves to do so as well.
Fat Ham uses this idea of expectation to involve the audience. The people in the crowd become parents to the play, so to speak, being made to question what the characters owe them and what they expect of theatre and tragedies. Eventually the characters reject the mass death inherent to their story, posing the question to the audience: “Why suffer the consequences of someone else's notion of what you should be?”
This play is an incredibly fun experience that does a great job expressing its ideas and beliefs and has so much more visually and physically to offer in a live performance than what is mentioned here. Although some elements of the play and its adaptation of Hamlet can seem clunky or strange, it’s well worth an afternoon or evening and does what it set out to do very well.
Lead Photo Credit: Chip Sherman, Dedra D. Woods, and Taj E.M. Burroughs in Fat Ham (2024) at Seattle Rep. Photo by Bronwen Houck.
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This review was written as part of an Arts Criticism workshop at Evergreen High School in Emily Acquino’s Language Arts classes, taught by Press Corps teaching artist Beth Pollack.
