“A Kind of Hamlet”: Rescripting Shakespeare and the Refusal of Racial Scripts in James Ijames’s Fat Ham

Abstract

In his 1926 “Criteria of Negro Art,” W.E.B. Du Bois advocates for art’s role in the quest for liberation while acknowledging the challenges facing the creation of Black art, observing, “We can go on the stage; we can be just as funny as white Americans wish us to be; we can play all the sordid parts that America likes to assign to Negroes; but for anything else there is still small place for us.” He elaborates, “As it is now we are handing everything over to a white jury.” Almost 100 years later, the issues Du Bois raises about Black art, the quest for Black freedom, and the structures of white supremacy that stymie this striving remain troublingly relevant for contemporary Shakespearean performance. As scholars have noted, complex challenges (the Shakespeare system, capitalist pressures, etc.) continue to make contemporary American Theater, and Shakespeare within it, “still a small space” for Black artists. In the face of these forces, what can and does resistance look like for Black artists within predominantly white theatrical spaces? Here, I tackle this question, thereby continuing the scholarly interrogation of the relationship between contemporary Shakespeare performance, race, and social justice. I turn to a recent lauded adaptation of Shakespeare that, in its move from local theater to Broadway, inevitably had to engage with the structures of American theater’s (and Shakespeare’s) racial capitalism—James Ijames’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Fat Ham (2021). Fat Ham, I contend, tackles head on the historical racial scripts imposed on Black subjects and, through a range of adaptive moves, exposes and resists them, offering counterscripts that insist on the personal and interpersonal complexity and flourishing of Black subjectivity.

1. Introduction

In his 1926 “Criteria of Negro Art,” first presented as part of the NAACP’s annual conference and subsequently published in The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois advocates for art’s role in the quest for liberation, arguing that art allows Black creatives to imagine future vistas through which they can appreciate and define concepts such as beauty, goodness, truth, and history (i.e., “the past”), thereby advancing a “freedom [that] is ever bounded by Truth and Justice” (Du Bois 1986, p. 1000). Yet Du Bois’s conceptualization of Black art is not a naïve vision of racial uplift. Rather, he acknowledges the structural realities that stand as barriers to the enriching vistas he hopes Black artists can imagine and pursue. Du Bois observes, “We can go on the stage; we can be just as funny as white Americans wish us to be; we can play all the sordid parts that America likes to assign to Negroes; but for anything else there is still small place for us” (Du Bois 1986, p. 999). He elaborates on the gatekeeping and reception of Black art, noting, “As it is now we are handing everything over to a white jury” (Du Bois 1986, p. 1001). Precisely who gets to assess Black art matters, for “until the art of the black folk compels recognition they will not be rated as human” (Du Bois 1986, p. 1002). One may not agree with DuBois’s assertion that all art is (or should be) propaganda nor that the recognition of Black art ties quite as directly as he imagines to Black people being “rated as human.” Nonetheless, I review DuBois’s arguments because the issues he raises about Black art, the quest for Black freedom, and the structures of white supremacy that stymie this striving remain troublingly relevant for this Special Issue’s topic: Shakespearean performance and the contemporary.

Despite being written almost 100 years ago, DuBois’s meditation on Black art resonates with and helpfully contextualizes the stakes of contemporary Black Shakespearean performance, particularly regarding both its creation and its representations of Blackness. As contemporary Black writers, actors, and directors consider if and why they might turn to the Bard and his classical works rather than developing original material, an essential facet of this consideration entails confronting how American theater and Shakespeare within it remain material and metaphoric white property. For even in the twenty-first century, Shakespearean performance in America (and beyond) functions within a theater system whose predominantly white creatives signal the “still small space” extant for Black creatives and whose predominantly white producers and audiences comprise the modern-day equivalent of a “white jury.”

Essentially, almost 100 years following DuBois’s discussion of Black art, it is distressing to consider just how little has changed. Elsewhere I have detailed the statistics that convey how facets of American theater from creative control to casting to audience attendance have been dominated by whiteness through the 2010s.1 Further evidence of the preponderance of whiteness in the theater industry came via a 2020 clarion call, the open letter known as We See You White American Theater (WSYWAT). WSYWAT pulled back the curtain, articulating expressly how Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color (BIPOC) are often excluded from artistic opportunities and face abuses when those opportunities are grudgingly granted. Five years later, American Theater’s editors conducted a random sampling of theaters across the U.S. and found a mixed response to WSYWAT’s demands for change. The “statistics do measure some real progress worth building on,” but “Viewed in raw numbers, this is obviously not where WSYWAT demanded the field should be” (Coutinho and Smith 2025). Put differently, though inarguably more inclusive, the structural realities of contemporary theater still more often than not hew closer to the dynamics Du Bois laid out in 1926 than the more equitable ones advocated for by WSYWAT in 2020.

Such realities are, unfortunately, not alleviated when it comes to performing Shakespeare. As Vanessa I. Corredera and Louise Geddes delineate, various pressures on the structures that prop up Shakespearean performance stymie the quest to pursue what Du Bois envisions as racial freedom via the performing arts. By addressing how what Madeline Sayet calls the Shakespeare system—a term encompassing the “complex and oppressive role his work, legacy, and positionality hold in our contemporary society” (Sayet 2020)—works hand-in-hand with capitalistic aims, Corredera and Geddes essentially describe American theater’s racial capitalism, Cedric J. Robinson’s designation to describe racism’s permeation of capitalism.2 Essentially, theaters attract paying audiences by advancing “conservative myths about white European cultural supremacy” as they laud Shakespeare’s supposed universal genius (Corredera and Geddes 2023, p. 582) and, consequently, tend to produce reimaginings of Shakespeare that hopefully do not alienate audiences who invest in that myth ideologically and with their pocketbooks. I synthesize Corredera and Geddes’s argument to review efficiently the complex challenges that continue to make contemporary American Theater, and Shakespeare within it, “still a small space” for Black artists. In the face of these forces, to revise and expand on questions that Corredera and Geddes ask, is resistance via Black Shakespeare even possible? If so, what can and does such recalcitrance look like for Black artists within predominantly white theatrical spaces?

Here, I tackle these questions and thus continue the scholarly interrogation of the relationship between contemporary Shakespeare performance, race, and social justice, a conversation especially timely as the field grapples with the fact that “Shakespeare’s work cannot always adequately address current issues of racism and racial justice” (Erickson and Hall 2016, p. 10).3 Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall stress that this interrogative wrestling requires “more studies of race and performance that themselves theorize/critique race rather than simply document the activities of people of color in the service of proving Shakespeare’s universality” (Erickson and Hall 2016, p. 9). In this essay, I do just that as I uncover what resistance can look like for Black artists choosing to work within the dual systems of Shakespeare and American Theater. I thus turn to a recent lauded adaptation of Shakespeare that, in its move from local theater to Broadway, inevitably had to engage with the structures of American theater’s (and Shakespeare’s) racial capitalism—James Ijames’s Pulitzer-prize winning Fat Ham. Fat Ham, I contend, tackles head on the historical racial scripts imposed on Black subjects and, through a range of adaptive moves, exposes and resists them, offering counterscripts that insist on the personal and interpersonal complexity and flourishing of Black subjectivity.

Ijames’s 2021 play is a very loose adaptation of Hamlet. Both stories focus on a young man whose uncle has murdered his father and subsequently taken up with his mother. But in Fat Ham, Shakespeare’s Denmark shifts into an unspecified place in the 20th-century American South, centering not on a white royal family but rather on a Black family known for running a local barbeque joint.4 Prince Hamlet, home from Wittenberg and grappling with his father’s spectral demand for revenge, becomes Juicy, a twenty-something taking online classes to finish a degree in Human Resources who challenges his own ghostly father’s calls for violence. Yet while both men may be haunted by the ghosts of their respective fathers, the Black, queer, outsider Juicy is more an approximation than a direct adaptation of Shakespeare’s arguably most famous character. It is no wonder that Ijames positions Juicy in Fat Ham’s character list as “A kind of Hamlet” (Ijames 2023, p. 5).5 This approximation of yet intentional distancing from what many consider to be Shakespeare’s signature text is, I argue, one in a number of moves that illustrate how Ijames works within yet ultimately resists the extant “small space” for Black art that has long plagued both Shakespeare and American theater.6 In an interview with American Theater, director Nicole Brewer described WSYWAT as “using the system against itself” (Coutinho and Smith 2025). In Fat Ham, Ijames likewise uses the system against itself as he stages a series of resistances to longstanding racial scripts, resistances that repeatedly refuse a range of troublingly familiar stereotypes. In their stead, through the characters, themes, and adaptive choices that make up Fat Ham, Ijames offers up the very insistence on the humanity of Black identity that Du Bois imagined as the promise of Black art.

2. Racial Scripts and Resistance

When DuBois observes that “we can be just as funny as white Americans wish us to be; we can play all the sordid parts that America likes to assign to Negroes…” (Du Bois 1986, p. 999), he is essentially referencing the racial scripts that white America uses to dictate Black art, and Black lives. Ronald L. Jackson defines the process of racial scripting as one “which presumes that there are social vectors that determine how bodies are inscribed and how scripted roles for foreign bodies are enacted” (Jackson II 2006, p. 53). These inscribed roles create “corporeal texts” that are “disembodied and redistributed within social space” (Jackson II 2006, p. 54). Racial scripts thus result in “a sociopolitical value-assessment of those bodies based on how well they match the script imposed on them” (Jackson II 2006, p. 54). Jackson’s definition proves particularly useful in its emphasis on the fact that assessing racial scripts entails attention to both the creation (how bodies are inscribed) and performance (how scripted roles are enacted) of said scripts. Like a dramatic script, racial scripts encompass the narrative, the characters that enact it, and the directions related to authorized performance.

Racial scripts may therefore be most readily identifiable through the cultural circulation of stereotypical characters that establishes expectations related to behavior. For Black Americans, these scripts include (but are not limited to) longstanding caricatures such as Uncle Tom (the asexual Black man who happily serves white needs) and his female counterpart the Mammy (the heavy-set, asexual Black woman happy to serve her white masters), or the Buck (the violent, sexually aggressive Black Man) and Jezebel (the hypersexual, duplicitous Black woman) figures.7 But racial scripts are likewise connected to how these characters should be conveyed—the stage directions of the script, if you will. For instance, Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race traces how racial scripts extend back into the premodern period through specific expectations of precisely how Blackness would be performed across early modern European stages. Ndiaye interrogates “performative blackness,” unpacking how scripts of blackness—“black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)”—worked together and across England, France, and Spain to bring “blackness into being as a racial category organizing power relations” (Ndiaye 2022, p. 3). Ndiaye thus argues that techniques of racial impersonation were repeatedly deployed in performance to a wide array of spectators across Europe, thereby working glocally (globally and locally) to constitute a prescriptive rather than descriptive Black identity (Ndiaye 2022, p. 20–28).

In Blackface, Ayanna Thompson explores how racial scripts have made their way off the early modern stage and inflected contemporary American culture through particular modes, i.e., narrative structures, of performance. She identifies “three distinct performance modes: minstrelsy/imitation, exhibition/trauma, and anxiety/authenticity” (Thompson 2020, p. 77), the first two of which are most pertinent to this argument.8 Minstrelsy/imitation involves a comedic performance in which “black actors borrow from white-created minstrel performance tropes,” such as the cross-dressing undertaken by Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, and Tyler Perry, respectively, in Norbit, Big Momma’s House, and The Diary of a Mad Black Woman (Thompson 2020, p. 82). Such performances may be critically derided, but they often result in commercial profit, which perhaps explains this script’s enduring legacy. After all, Du Bois specifically identifies the performance of humor for white Americans as one of the few roles allowed for Black artists. In direct opposition stands the racial script of the exhibition/trauma mode, which brutally and repeatedly places Black trauma on full display so that the Black actor becomes “the figure whose voice is powerless but whose body is nonetheless always available for the white gaze” (Thompson 2020, p. 87). To echo Du Bois, a sordid part indeed. Here, the films 12 Years A Slave (which Thompson analyzes at length) or the more recent Antebellum spring to mind. Unlike the minstrelsy script, the trauma mode frequently garners artistic accolades. This connection between Black trauma and artistic reward perhaps explains the preponderance in American theater of what Michael J. Bobbitt has called “trauma dramas,” narratives in which the “whole story of people of color, of marginalized people and oppressed people, get reduced to the thing that makes us oppressed,” thereby leading to stories that “focus solely on our oppression, our trauma, our dying” (Bobbitt 2022). Jamel Shabazz in fact bridges anti-Black stereotypes with the trauma mode, explaining, “For centuries, Blackness has been too equated with agony and grief. Persistent and determined fights for racial equity have challenged and made shifts to this old narrative, but the world around us continues to reinforce the worst. It continues to portray Black people as criminal, dangerous, unbeautiful, unworthy, disadvantaged, and good only for what pleasures or labor our bodies can provide” (Shabazz 2023, p. 1). To recognize that these multifarious racial scripts live on and recirculate is essential, for just as Du Bois acknowledged that these dehumanizing parts are made for and judged by a “white jury” in 1926, Thompson makes a similar assertion in 2020, arguing that “as disparate as these performance modes are,” they nonetheless “leave one with the sense that performing blackness is still a white property that uneasily sits on black bodies” (Thompson 2020, p. 94). And this performance of Blackness as white property extends to the stage, where, as Ambereen Dadabhoy observes, the Black actor must confront “the white audience’s racializing gaze, which inscribes the actor within already existing cultural scripts” (Dadabhoy 2020, p. 83). Thus, while these racial scripts may stretch back centuries, they nevertheless require active resistance in this contemporary moment, including in theater.

But what shape can artistic resistance to racial scripts take in the authoritative and authorizing space of the white-dominated Shakespearean stage? In her keen analysis of the various forms of resistance that Black Americans have strategically and powerfully deployed across history, Kellie Carter Jackson notes that whether turning to what she categorizes as revolution, protection, force, flight, or joy, Black resistance has been grounded in refusal. She elaborates, “Refusal is a forceful no […] Refusal is about rejection. It abhors oppression and insists on setting the terms for how humanity should be understood and treated with dignity, respect, and decency” (Jackson 2024, pp. 6–7). Working from this definition of refusal, I suggest that Fat Ham stages a series of refusals that, whether applied to character, embodiment, or narrative, forcefully reject abiding racial scripts. Crucially, however, although these refusals confront trauma, Ijames avoids creating just another trauma drama by staging an oppositional stance of hopeful insistence that, to echo Du Bois and Jackson, compels recognition of the complexity, dignity, humanity, and joy of Black identity.

3. Refusal 1: Respectability Politics

Recognizing Fat Ham’s resistive stance is perhaps the most difficult and thus all the more crucial to identify when it comes to the characterization of Juicy’s family and friends. For instance, a mother who quickly moves her romantic affections to her dead husband’s brother signifies differently for Fat Ham’s Tedra than it does for Hamlet’s Gertrude. While Hamlet may criticize his mother’s supposed lasciviousness, Gertrude’s whiteness and her status as queen work together to shield her more generally from censure. Tedra’s status as a lower-class Black woman, however, means that when she embraces her romantic and sexual desires as she shifts her relationship from Pap to Rev, her characterization invokes the wanton sexuality of the Jezebel racial script. And this stereotype-adjacent depiction applies to all the middle-aged characters in the play. Rabby, the Polonius figure, is the absurd, church-going, hypercritical Black matriarch, a sort of fused, lite version of the angry Black woman and the asexualized mammy figure, while, as I will discuss at more length in the next section, both Pap (the equivalent of Hamlet Sr.) and Rev (Fat Ham’s version of Claudius) align with the script of the dominating, violent Black man who fails as a model father figure. It is thus understandable that both colleagues and students with whom I have dialogued about this play have observed the semiotic impact of shifting the story from what Western culture perceives as the white, high-status world of Hamlet to the Black, low-status milieu of Fat Ham.

Yet a generous engagement with Fat Ham can interpret Ijames’s shift as a strategic refusal of respectability politics. Originally, the politics of respectability were themselves a form of resistance against racist caricatures, with Black people “adopt[ing] self-presentation strategies that downplayed sexuality and emphasized morality and dignity to reject White America’s stereotypes of them”(Pitcan et al. 2018, p. 164).9 Respectability thus became “a tactic used by low-status individuals in the hope of obtaining social mobility” (Pitcan et al. 2018, p. 164). This form of resistance is ambivalent at best, a type of capitulation at worst. One problem is that respectability can typically be most effectively performed by people within the marginalized group who have access to a form of privilege, thus reifying forms of in-group stratification. Another problem is that the concept of respectability itself derives from adhering to behaviors established by “racist, sexist, and classist norms” that elevate upper-class white masculinity and femininity as the de facto standard (Pitcan et al. 2018, p. 164). Additionally, respectability politics frequently lead those in marginalized groups to focus on individual effort and merit rather than systemic issues. In fact, as Hakeem Jefferson’s research reveals, people invested in respectability tend to embrace punitive social policies that broadly harm less privileged members of their social group (Jefferson 2023). Frederick C. Harris thus articulates precisely how respectability politics have become detrimental for Black Americans:

For more than half of the twentieth century, the concept of the “Talented Tenth” commanded black elites to “lift as we climb,” or to prove to white America that blacks were worthy of full citizenship rights by getting the untalented nine-tenths to rid themselves of bad customs and habits. Today’s politics of respectability, however, commands blacks left behind in post–civil rights America to “lift up thyself.”

(F. C. Harris 2014)

According to Harris, respectability politics function as a white-defined set of behavioral rules adopted by the Black elite who then employ these standards to focus on strategies that stress individual uplift rather than systemic change. I list some of the issues bedeviling respectability politics to illuminate why Ijames may choose to challenge them through Fat Ham’s focus on a dysfunctional Black family in the American south, a family whose associations with murder, sexuality, drinking, and weed most certainly do not fit neatly within respectability’s parameters. Indeed, through Rabby, Ijames exposes the pitfalls of respectability politics by illuminating the way they thwart interpersonal connection and understanding.

Though perhaps easily dismissed as comic relief or as a necessary but less important correlative to Hamlet’s Polonius, Rabby can instead be seen as a necessary critique of respectability’s perils. Her costuming sets her apart from the other characters, for Rabby moves through every scene as the only person dressed as if they have just come from Sunday church service. While other characters wear jeans, track suits, or other causal clothing, she appears in a traditional skirt suit and church hat, a costume that conveys her adherence to respectability’s parameters. Rabby desires respectability not just for herself, but also for her children, as indicated too by their attire. Larry (the Laertes figure) arrives to Tedra and Rev’s makeshift wedding reception in his Naval Service Dress Blue, which Rabby stresses by noting how good he looks, while Rabby forces Opal (Fat Ham’s Ophelia) to wear a dress, a clothing choice Juicy emphasizes when he remarks that he has “never seen you in a dress before” (Ijames 2023, p. 70). By staging Rabby’s emphasis on her children’s self-presentation, Ijames communicates her investment in the masculine and feminine expectations that connect them to respectability.

Yet Fat Ham uncovers how this investment in respectability fissures relational connection. The first hint of the way respectability creates interpersonal divides comes through Opal, who shares with Juicy, “You should see how she looks at me sometimes. Utterly confused” (Ijames 2023, p. 76). In her desire to have her daughter conform to expected social norms for women, Rabby misses that Opal is in fact fascinated by and drawn to violence, hates wearing dresses, and likes girls. In regard to both gender presentation and sexual desire, then, Opal is decidedly not respectable but rather decidedly queer. But because these qualities, characteristics, and desires are not respectable, Rabby can look at but cannot truly see, that is recognize, who her daughter is. Though less apparent, the same dynamic characterizes Rabby’s relationship with Larry. Her emphasis on his uniform and military prowess conveys how she focuses on the aspects of him that align with respectability politics. Because Larry conforms to the standards of respectability while Opal does not, the two do not appear to be in conflict. Yet just as Rabby does not see, that is recognize Opal, she likewise does not see Larry, as becomes clear near Fat Ham’s end when Juicy exposes to a shocked Rabby that Larry is gay. Ijames even creates a scene where the language of respectability comes to the fore, and when it does, so too does the relational cost of respectability politics. Though much less so than Hamlet, Juicy also spends the play prevaricating, attempting to determine whether he should divulge that Rev sent someone in prison to murder Pap, which leads to a confrontational game of charades, Fat Ham’s equivalent of the Mousetrap scene. After Rev storms off with Tedra following behind him, Rabby’s investment in respectability moves from subtext to text as she criticizes Juicy and his family’s lack of respectability:

Rabby. Mmmmmhmmmm. See what happens?

Larry. What?

Rabby. When you don’t live right. When you get focused on the wrong things.

Opal. They your friends.

Rabby. Don’t mean I can’t see. I got better plans for you two. Opal you going to college and Larry you gonna be a general.

(Ijames 2023, p. 104)

This exchange between Rabby and her children reveals the way she uses respectability—living “right” and a focus on the right versus “the wrong things”—as a measuring stick when she suggests that the dysfunction in Juicy’s family derives from improper behavior and thinking, which she counters with appropriate “plans” for her own children.

As the scene unfolds, however, it stages a critical stance toward Rabby’s actions and mindset. Opal’s rejoinder reminding Rabby of her connection (i.e., friendship) to Rev, Tedra, and Juicy directs attention to the ways that a focus on respectability can create relational distance rather than interpersonal belonging. The cost of respectability becomes even clearer as the audience experiences how it divides Rabby from her son and daughter. Both youths challenge Rabby’s respectability politics expressly, with Larry revealing, “I don’t like fighting Mama,” followed by Opal declaring that she wants to be a Marine (Ijames 2023, p. 105). The audience therefore experiences a clear instance of Rabby looking at but not seeing her children. Indeed, she denies their personal desires, insisting, “This aint’ how this is about to go” (Ijames 2023, p. 105). This back and forth thus exposes the connection between Rabby’s controlling nature and respectability politics, as well as the various ways that an investment in respectability can lead to the severing of both community and family kinship. Through Rabby, then, it becomes clear that Fat Ham self-consciously attempts to stage how clinging to respectability politics can thwart both personal and interpersonal thriving.

Admittedly, to embrace what can be traditionally considered unrespectable through sexual characters like Tedra, or queer characters like Juicy, Larry, and Opal, or lower-class characters like every single figure in the play can be risky. After all, as Du Bois recognizes, “Our worst side has been so shamelessly emphasized that we are denying we have or ever had a worst side” (Du Bois 1986, p. 1001), and that can hold all the truer as an emphasis on racial scripts that emphasize “a worst side” has stretched into the twenty-first century. Yet reading Rabby as a warning against the politics of respectability opens space to conceptualize Fat Ham’s centering of these unrespectable, even seemingly stereotypical characters as a form of resistance, a clear refusal of respectability’s value that insists on and thereby exposes its relational thrift.

4. Refusal 2: Stereotypical Black Masculinity

The fracturing of filial relationships is also essential to another refusal at the heart of Fat Ham—namely, the play’s refusal of and thus resistance to the stereotypical racial scripts ascribed to Black masculinity. It is this narrative throughline that has Fat Ham veer most toward appearing like a trauma drama, for in order to show toxic masculinity’s cost, the play weaves together its rejection of patriarchal Black masculinity with an exploration of generational trauma. The specter of generational trauma is, aptly, introduced through Pap, Juicy’s recently deceased father’s ghost. From the outset, audiences can discern that he is an antagonistic figure. When Pap first confronts Juicy, he immediately inquires, “that sheet scared you, didn’t it. You scared?” (Ijames 2023, p. 16). Fear functions as a form of domination, for it becomes clear as the play unfolds that Juicy stands in contradistinction to the men in his family due to his being “soft.” Ijames’s stage directions emphasize this softness, noting that Juicy should be “gloriously and beautifully soft, both in body and temperament” (Ijames 2023, p. 7). Juicy is also described by the character list and those within the play as “thicc.” Productions of Fat Ham therefore typically cast an actor for Juicy whose physical appearance exhibits that softness, with the actor frequently having a heavier-set figure than the normative masculine body of Western culture.10 This external, physical quality thus becomes a signifier for Juicy’s temperament, one that starkly differs from and has no place within the aggressive domination embodied by the men of his family.

In We Real Cool, bell hooks explores Black masculinity at length, arguing that historically it derived predominantly through “the struggle for patriarchal power [in which] influential black males engage in with white males, the unidentified gender war that has been taking place since slavery ended” (hooks 2004, p. 2). In short, Black men developed an attraction to and learned the performance of patriarchy’s domination via the plantation patriarchy they saw exhibited by white men (hooks 2004, pp. 3–4). As a result, “by the time slavery ended patriarchal masculinity had become an accepted ideal for most black men, an ideal that would be reinforced by twentieth-century norms” (hooks 2004, p. 4). But what were the masculine ideals established by (Southern) white men? Ronald Neal characterizes Southern white masculinity as what he terms “Abrahamic masculinity” (Neal 2013, p. 243), which “may be defined as a masculinity of power, wealth, and status in the name of a benevolent yet abusively hierarchical paternalism. It is driven by masculine practices that depend on gendered subordination and the pursuit of empire” (Neal 2013, p. 243). Men who do not ascribe to Abrahamic masculinity, “who do not display the paternalistic slave holder, violence-prone, and misogynist virtues” Neal explains, “are often dismissed as pathological and perverse” (Neal 2013, p. 244). Neal elaborates:

Males who are not property owners, males who do not actively pursue heterosexual marriage and procreation, males who are not in dominant relationships with women, children, and other males, and males who refuse to engage in masculinized projects of empire-building are deemed to be cancers that ruin the body politic of civilization. Their abject masculinities are defined as interior, immoral, unproductive, immature, perverse, or criminal.

(Neal 2013, p. 244)

While not all these characteristics map neatly onto the desires articulated by the men in Fat Ham, the masculine emphasis on domination, especially within the family, certainly does. It is as if the Black home and the community within it are a form of empire-building writ small, one where men like Pap and his brother Revcan control others while demeaning the “abject masculinities” Neal identifies, particularly in and through Juicy.

Indeed, the structure of Fat Ham conveys very clearly that Juicy’s vision of his identity, and with it, of his masculinity, differs significantly from the one shared by Pap and Rev. In doing so, Fat Ham not only stages the racial script of toxic Black masculinity; the play starkly indicts it. The same actor doubles the paternal roles of Pap and Rev, thus suggesting a profound connection between the men’s worldviews, each articulating a dominating ethos that appears to varying degrees across the brothers. They are, the casting reveals, two sides of the same toxic masculine coin. Pap stresses his authority over Juicy, for when Juicy attempts to reject his pleas for revenge, he employs patrilineal guilt, noting, “We supposed to be one beating heart. You and me. You my son! You my namesake!” (Ijames 2023, p. 18). While on the surface this statement may seem to signal mutuality and interdependence—they are one beating heart, according to Pap—Juicy makes clear that Pap’s comment is a form of coercion when he replies, “It’s amazing what fathers think they own of their sons just cause we share a name” (Ijames 2023, p. 19). By using the word “own,” Juicy adeptly conveys the controlling nature of his and Pap’s relationship. Pap affirms his controlling naturewhen he strives to transform Juicy’s softness. Pap asks Juicy to “catch that hog brother of mine by the snout and gut that motherfucker,” then follows up by asking how Juicy feels about the request (Ijames 2023, p. 26). Juicy replies, “I hate it.” This rejection of violence is a form of softness, a way Juicy distinguishes himself from Pap’s toxic masculinity. Yet Pap attempts to appropriate that softness and transform it, declaring, “That’s what you want. Hate’s good” (Ijames 2023, p. 27). Pap and Juicy may therefore share a name—though it is worth noting that one never hears nor reads that echo—but Fat Ham makes clear that they share no ethical, paradigmatic, or affective bond.

Rev too allows the audience to recognize the failings of toxic masculinity. On the surface, Rev may appear less controlling than Pap, but he becomes the mouthpiece for the pervading masculine logic that continuously demeans Juicy. For instance, Rev shares with Juicy that he liked Juicy when he was little, stating that he “Always felt like there was something/Special about you” (Ijames 2023, p. 45). Yet as Juicy grew older:

you got soft.

And you was nothing like your daddy or like me.

You was soft.

And the men in our family ain’t soft.

And I started to think,

Look at this little pocket of nothing.

(Ijames 2023, p. 45)

In Rev’s estimation, Juicy becomes a thing (a “little pocket”) and no thing (“nothing”) all at once. His objectifying formulation strips Juicy of his humanity. And whether driven by fear, hate, or both, this vision of masculinity results in violence. It may take the form of Pap murdering someone because of the man’s bad breath. It may take the form of Rev hiring an incarcerated assassin to shiv Pap in prison. It may take the form of verbally accosting Juicy and belittling him publicly by punching him in the stomach. Whichever shape this toxic masculinity takes, the stage directions make clear that they are all dangerous, explicating, “Rev’s raging is decidedly more contained than his brother’s. Its locus being in the fury of his lips and tongue rather than his whole body. Which is why he hires people to do his dirty work while Pap cuts people’s throats for breathing. Very different kinds of toxicity. Both dangerous. However the former is the one we don’t always recognize as a threat” (Ijames 2023, p. 58). Putting the stage directions in conversation with Rev’s comments to Juicy thus creates a potent rejection of the masculinity circulating within and inherited by the so-called “men in our family,” in other words, a stark refusal of the Black male racial script.

A vital facet of this refusal is the way that Fat Ham expressly and movingly conveys the corrosive nature of these generational investments in patriarchal domination while concomitantly offering up alternative visions of masculinity through Juicy and Tio. In other words, Fat Ham exposes the deficiency of the racial scripts embraced by the older generation by insisting on the value found in the alternative visions of masculinity embraced by the young men. Juicy offers an antidote to his father’s toxic masculinity by valuing the traditionally feminine qualities—the softness—that Pap rejects. In a fourth-wall breaking monologue, he shares with the audience a moment that highlights the long-festering tensions between him and his father as well as the way he is drawn to affective qualities that are very distinct from the violence and hate Pap espouses. When little, Juicy narrates, his mother bought him a doll that taught him “beauty. Softness. Tenderness. Realness” (Ijames 2023, p. 59). Undoubtedly, the affects associated with this doll contrast with the qualities of domination that pervade Abrahamic masculinity. Perhaps that is why Pap threw the doll into the smoker, leading Juicy to cry so much that he could not breathe and, Ophelia-like, “had the thought / To drown myself in one of the old ponds” (Ijames 2023, p. 59). This evocative juxtaposition of the softness, tenderness, and realness elicited by the doll with the emotional and mental darkness inflicted on Juicy by his father’s vicious destruction the gift further denounces the toxic masculinity espoused by Pap and Rev, for the scene lays bare the individual and communal harm that the Black masculine racial script causes. Through this rejection, then, the scene also tacitly valorizes the alternate, softer, and more emotionally nourishing masculinity embodied by Juicy, a masculinity open enough to be lit up rather than threatened by a mere doll.

If the audience sees in Juicy a tacit commendation of a masculine counterscript, that approbation moves from tacit to explicit through Juicy’s cousin Tio (the play’s Horatio figure). It is Tio who voices an argument similar to bell hooks’s when he suggests that Black men follow a racial script crafted to oppress them by their enslavers but that they nonetheless pass along to their children. Through Tio, audiences and readers alike come to understand that Black Americans face not only whatever particular trauma their given families carry; they also face the cultural trauma of American slavery and its historical impact, and a defining feature of this impact is the domination associated with the Black male racial script. Sociologist Ron Eyerman characterizes slavery as a cultural trauma, one which Black Americans need not have experienced directly to be traumatized by its effects (Eyerman 2001, pp. 1–3). According to Joy DeGruy, the answer to how this trauma is transmitted “is quite straightforward: from how we learn to raise our children” (DeGruy 2017, p. 102). She elaborates with an example that particularly resonates with Fat Ham:

In many families, the father is dominant. Who was the dominant male in a slave’s life? The master was figuratively, if not literally, the father. It was the master who, more often than not, became the imprint for male parental behavior…and this imprint was passed down through the generations. At its foundation, this imprint was dominated by the necessity to control others through violence and aggression.

(DeGruy 2017, p. 103)

Tio directly articulates this connection between Black Americans’ past enslavement and the way that history shapes Black families in the present when he shares with Juicy a conversation he had with his therapist. Tio recounts, “These cycles of violence are like deep. Engrained. Hell, engineered. Hard to come out of. Like, 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? Slavery. It’s inherited trauma. You carrying around your whole family’s trauma, man” (Ijames 2023, p. 35). In these few lines, Tio exposes for audiences the trauma of the past as he draws a line from Juicy’s family back to slavery. At the same time, he dismisses the common anti-Black pathologizing of the Black family. Hortense Spillers famously notes how, from the hull of the slave ship to the Black family described in the infamous Moynihan Report, dominant society has strategically severed Black people from the domestic, from kinship ties, from the dominant symbolic order’s concept of family itself (Spillers 1987, pp. 72–75). Tio, however, resists this pathologizing when he stresses that the family’s trauma is not inherent but rather “engrained,” even “engineered.” Tio may not delve into the specifics of the American history of Black oppression underpinning that comment, but in conjunction with the reference to slavery, his argument nonetheless lays responsibility on white supremacy for the trauma Juicy and the men in his family have had and are experiencing. In short, Tio makes manifest that the Black male racial script is not reality but rather just that—a script.

At the same time, however, Tio offers a brief yet potent rejection of that racial script. He reminds Juicy, “But you don’t got to let it define you” (Ijames 2023, p. 35). With one brief line, Tio presents a different option than the racial script Pap and Rev have thus far offered Juicy. Rather than leaning in to and embracing the racial scripts handed down to him and to other Black men, Tio emphasizes the personal agency that leads to the refusal of white supremacy’s expectations. Carrying the trauma is “ok;” there should be no shame, Tio asserts. But Juicy does not need “to let it define you.” This is a clear refusal of the longstanding racial scripts white supremacy engineered. But it is also a vital insistence to Juicy and the audience alike on the value of seeking and finding new possibilities that counter the intertwined pain of toxic masculinity and the legacies of anti-Blackness.

Significantly, Tio articulates what that possibility could look like, or at the very least the personal values that could help one find new ways of defining oneself. Near the play’s end, Tio shares a story of him getting high and playing a game on a virtual reality headset that involves throwing snowballs at gingerbread men. Tio’s story is a bit convoluted, more effective on stage that written down, but the heart of this tale is a moment when he breaks down crying and is fellated by a gingerbread man. This absurd, perhaps easily dismissed imagery carries with it a profound message, however, for Tio’s emotional and sexual catharsis leads him to observe:

And you begin to consider what your life would be like if you chose pleasure over harm. Yeah? You consider what the world can be like. What if you imagine the world differently […] Why waste it trying to be miserable cause it’s gonna make somebody else happy. See if you can find out how to be happy…for yourself […] You decide right then to stop accepting what has always been […] and you start to build, in your mind, what your world is going to look like.

(Ijames 2023, pp. 139–40)

Happiness over anger. Personal agency over social expectations. Pleasure over harm. Valuing the future over the past. Through this surreal, farcical, fantastical memory, Tio conveys to the audience within and outside of the play a vision of selfhood that expressly rejects the qualities of fear, violence, filial obligation, and being mired in family history that dictate Pap’s and Rev’s embodiments of masculinity. Ultimately, then, Fat Ham refuses the racial script of Black masculinity; in its stead, the play insists that individual and generational healing comes from the softness and pleasure that the young men like Juicy and Tio embrace.

5. Refusal 3: Queer Marginalization

As my discussion about both the politics of respectability and Black masculinity make clear, these racial scripts are imbricated in an anti-queer attitude, one that drives the parental figures, with the exception of Tedra, to ostracize queerness. Thus, while an examination of Fat Ham’s treatment of queerness intersects with the play’s critique of both respectability politics and patriarchal Black masculinity, given that the play features three queer characters in Juicy, Opal, and Larry, Fat Ham’s engagement with and refusal of queer marginalization merits specific attention. Though Juicy, Larry, and Opal all identify as queer in some way, it is Juicy who bears the brunt of other characters’ homophobic marginalization. For instance, when Juicy resists Pap’s demand that he not eat a candy bar, Pap taunts, “You finally gonna stand up to your pap. Over a candy bar. You pansy. Girlie-ass puddle of spit.” (Ijames 2023, p. 22). The anti-queer language of “pansy” and “Girlie-ass” is stark and unmissable, communicating that Pap takes offense not just with Juicy’s defiance of his demands, but with the fact that this defiance comes from his queer Black son. Pap even declares forthrightly, “Can’t stand you” (Ijames 2023, p. 22). That Pap’s disdain for Juicy derives from the fact that Juicy does not follow patriarchal Black masculinity’s toxic masculine script is evident, with Pap deriding the fact that Juicy is “too soft to die young. You aint’ got it. What it takes. To perish, like me” (Ijames 2023, p. 26). To be clear, while Pap does not mention Juicy being queer expressly, his references to “softness” serve as euphemisms for his heterosexism, his valuing of heterosexuality and traditional masculine gender norms (as outlined above). Softness for Pap thus signifies Juicy’s rejection of masculine domination as well as his rejection of heteronormativity, an apt conflation, for in the logic of Abrahamic masculinity, as Neal points out, the two are inextricably intertwined. This is likely why, later, Rev also picks up on the language of softness, reminding Juicy repeatedly that he is soft, unlike the men in his family (Ijames 2023, p. 45). But Rev takes his abuse of Juicy further, punching him in an unspoken attempt to “man him up.” Even Rabby joins in on the heterosexist rejection of Juicy, admonishing Larry when Juicy disrespects her, “You going to let that sissy talk to me like that?” (Ijames 2023, p. 129). As this catalog of moments illustrates, Juicy experiences persistent interpersonal alienation in the form of verbal, emotional, and even physical abuse because of his queerness. He does not follow the heteronormative racial script, and by the heterosexist logic espoused by his elders, he must therefore pay the price of unbelonging.

Juicy’s marginalization at the hands of his friends and family thus writes small the broader, real-world social tensions within Black communities that likewise struggle with an investment in heterosexist norms. Angelique C. Harris argues that while the color line still exists, “‘the problem of the 21st century’” is in fact “the further fragmentation and relegation within already oppressed groups, causing intragroup marginalization” (A. C. Harris 2009, p. 431). She therefore turns her attention to the heterosexism and homophobia that cause this fragmentation. Harris notes how “Historically, the Black Church has reinforced gender roles within the African American community,” roles which have not been receptive toward queerness (A. C. Harris 2009, p. 438). Accordingly, Harris contends, the Black Church is responsible for “influencing many African Americans’ negative perceptions of same-sex marriage and encouraging a general sense of homophobia within the African American community” (A. C. Harris 2009, p. 439). Given both Black culture’s and American society’s emphasis on traditional gender expectations, Black men prove to be particularly resistant to queerness, Harris contends; accordingly, “homophobic African American heterosexual men try to separate themselves as much as possible from gay men, men who are perceived to have ‘voluntarily given up’ their male privilege, one of the few privileges possessed by African American men” (A. C. Harris 2009, p. 433). The separation Harris identifies may be survivable, like what Juicy experiences in Fat Ham, but at times it becomes more extreme, for as T. Anansi Wilson notes, “to assert our desires is to be marked as furtive, as justifiably disappeared, lashed or otherwise violated” (emphasis in the original, Wilson 2020, p. 170). It is no wonder, that he attests, “BlaQueer people are nowhere safe; not amongst their racial collective, nor the broader white or non-Black LGBTQ community” (Wilson 2020, p. 177). While such heterosexist and homophobic attitudes generally align with, in fact may simply copy, the wider homophobia and heterosexism of white American culture, Cheryl Clarke admonishes that such alignment cannot be used to excuse Black communities; “we cannot rationalize the disease of homophobia among black people as the white man’s fault, for to do so is to absolve ourselves of our responsibility to transform ourselves” (Clarke 1983, p. 197). What Fat Ham stages via Juicy’s marginalization, then, is the individual and communal cost exacted when such transformation fails to materialize.

Alongside Juicy’s marginalization, however, Fat Ham depicts a resistance to a racial script that would otherwise write Juicy out of the narrative. Adapting Hamlet to feature one queer main character and two additional queer secondary characters is already one form of potential resistance. Even if the social world within Fat Ham tries to marginalize them, the play itself moves them from the margins to the center. But Fat Ham’s refusal of queer marginalization extends beyond its staging of queer characters to include Juicy’s resistive acts that negate his dehumanization as well as a plot that reveals the destructive nature of anti-queerness alongside the nurturing nature of the queer. Fat Ham thus resists a racial script that devalues queerness, insisting instead upon the fullness and beauty of Black queer identity.

A key facet of rejecting anti-queerness is the way Fat Ham lays bare in both comedic and pathos-filled moments Juicy’s repeated resistance to his marginalization. As a sympathetic, engaging central character who, Iago-like, is the only dramatic figure able to speak directly to the audience, Juicy is positioned to garner a sympathetic response. His negation of Pap’s, Rev’s, and Rabby’s demeaning comments and behavior thus make a significant impact. Many of Juicy’s pushbacks are minor, such as repeated, brief rebuttals against remonstrations of his softness or weirdness. But there are also more noticeable forms of resistance that allow the audience to see Juicy embrace his queer identity. Once such moment occurs after Rev demands that Juicy go inside and change out of his all-black clothes. In some productions, this costume is made up of a hoodie and black shorts. In others, it entails leather and combat boots. The costume thus serves as a window into the type of Juicy the production envisions, just how hard or soft Juicy might be. Juicy grudgingly acquiesces to Rev’s demand that he change, but rather than serving as a capitulation, Juicy’s new outfit signals his embrace of his queer identity and thus his resistance to Rev. When Juicy reemerges, he is still wearing predominantly all-black, but now he dons a shirt adorned with the words “Mama’s Boy,” typically in a notable bright pink, as well as a scarf in pink and/or purple hues. The stage directions call for the look to be “quite chic, urban and flattering” (Ijames 2023, p. 43). Juicy’s reentrance thereby creates a playful but nonetheless clear sartorial denial of Rev’s authority. Though Rev has demanded something “festive,” (Ijames 2023, p. 41), Juicy remains in “all that black” (Ijames 2023, p. 40), and although Rev stresses that Juicy should embrace a patriarchal line—“You got a new daddy” (Ijames 2023, p. 40)—Juicy chooses a shirt that rejects traditional masculinity, positioning himself as unequivocally connected to his matrilineal line. In fact, the mama’s boy identification alongside the fabulous pink scarf creates a sartorial shorthand for Juicy’s turning toward his queerness. Unmistakably, then, this turning toward who he really is also functions as a Juicy turning away from the heterosexist norms Rev espouses.

If the playful scarf and glittery “Mama’s Boy” t-shirt create a lighthearted moment of micro-resistance for Juicy, in the karaoke set piece, readers and audiences find a moving scene wherein Juicy poignantly uses music to once again embrace his minoritarian identity as he refuses the heterosexist racial script imposed on Black men and women. As Tedra and Rev prompt their friends and family to celebrate their recent nuptials, Tedra calls for a round of karaoke. Eventually, Tedra encourages Juicy to take the mic. And he does, as he performs an initially muted version of Radiohead’s 1992 breakout hit single “Creep.” Significantly, before this scene, Juicy has been called “weird” by various characters in the play. In fact, as soon as Juicy begins the song, Rev critiques, “This weird depressing shit” (Ijames 2023, p. 88). At first, the song is a bit odd and awkward. But the stage directions make clear that by the song’s second verse, Juicy “somehow thoroughly transforms the space” (Ijames 2023 p. 90). Thus, as Juicy’s voice rises in confidence, the song’s lyrics resonate with meaning. I quote the lyrics at length:

I don’t care if it hurts

I wanna have control

I want a perfect body

I want a perfect soul

I want you to notice

When I’m not around

So fuckin special

I wish I was special

But I’m a creep

I’m a weirdo

(Ijames 2023, pp. 90–91)

Just as Fat Ham acknowledges the trauma of toxic Black masculinity through Tio’s discussion with his therapist, in this moment, the play recognizes the trauma of Juicy’s marginalization. He wants to be seen, to be noticed, to be special in ways people refuse to grant him because of his identity. As he launches into the chorus with “But I’m a creep / I’m a weirdo,” audiences can garner a deeper understanding of what the lyrics might mean when applied to Juicy. After all, “weird” has repeatedly been a euphemism for the difference signaled by his queer identity. Thus, while Radiohead’s Thom Yorke originally wrote the song to describe an obsessive man pining after a woman who does not return his affection, Juicy appropriates the lyrics, transforming them into a commentary on his alienation and into an unmistakable declaration of his so-called “weird” queerness. While the song is not affirmative per se, the moment nonetheless communicates that Juicy refuses to reject his queer identity; he is a weirdo after all, even as he rejects the pain it causes him.

Juicy’s public self-acceptance of his queerness, even if limited in scope, catalyzes interactions that illustrate how queerness can lead to personal and interpersonal thriving while anti-queerness leads to ruin. Through this dynamic, Fat Ham creates a plot that further denounces the marginalization of Black queerness as it insists on the restorative possibilities that can be found in queer desire and identity. Such hopeful possibilities especially come to the fore in an exchange between Larry and Juicy that follows shortly after the karaoke scene. Larry declares straightforwardly, “I want to be soft again” (Ijames 2023, p. 109), thereby invoking the terminology used to humiliate Juicy and reframing it as a positive characteristic. This is a clear refusal of the Black male racial script’s heterosexist values by none other than a Navy man. Larry elaborates on this desire when he expounds, “I want to be soft. I want to arch my back. I want to bless somebody with how soft I can be. I want to lay my head in your lap…” (Ijames 2023, p. 110). In a reference that appropriates Hamlet’s misogynistic verbal play in Ophelia’s lap and transforms it into a vision of blessing, Larry unfurls a poetic fantasy of connection and desire. He thereby brings together the various elements of softness referenced throughout Fat Ham: queerness, interpersonal mutuality, and a temperament invested in beauty and love rather than in domination. Larry even stresses the affective nature of his longing when he insists to Juicy that for him, softness is “not what I’m thinking it’s what I’m feeling” (Ijames 2023, p. 110). It is worth noting Larry’s longing to become “soft again” (emphasis added). Softness seems to be a facet of selfhood he has lost. While Larry is never called “hard” per se, and he is certainly not the same in his embodiment of masculinity as either Pap or Rev, his Navy uniform takes on significatory weight during this admission, as if to indicate that he has become hard through his Naval service. But Larry casts responsibility not upon his service but rather on the scripts society requires him to follow. When Juicy asks what is preventing Larry from being soft, he admits, “People decide what they want you to be. It’s hard to fight that” (Ijames 2023, p. 109). Though indirect, here, Larry references the racial and gendered scripts that stymie personal and interpersonal flourishing. Indeed, his reply reveals how these scripts compromise the agential ability to decide who you want to be in contrast with what others determine for you. In this way, Larry is not all that different from Juicy, who, through Pap and Rev, has confronted the same struggles. But that Larry turns to Juicy for help in his quest for softness indicates that Juicy, in the small ways I have already noted, has found methods for rejecting these scripts, even if tenuously. It is no wonder, then, that Larry asks Juicy to save him. Thus, within the world of Fat Ham, Juicy’s softness may not be fully embraced by others, but it is held up as valuable by Larry and the play itself.

While Larry’s hoped-for salvific moment does not materialize, this interchange between Larry and Juicy echoes the language Juicy uses when discussing his childhood doll, creating dialogue full of beauty, desire, longing, softness, and hope. Queerness in Fat Ham therefore carries with it the promise of something better, something beautiful, a promise that insists on the value of the queer in a refusal of the trauma caused by its marginalization. And while this trauma can be best recognized through Juicy’s plaintive singing and Larry’s unrealized longings, it can also be identified in the cost of anti-queerness upon those who enact it. As already discussed, the anti-queerness of the politics of respectability alienate Rabby from her children, creating a distance where she spends much of the play refusing to recognize who they really are in order to follow her preferred racial script. But Rev offers an even more extreme example. The heterosexism of the racial scripts to which he adheres literally costs him his life. Near the play’s close, following the game of charades, Juicy eventually declares outrightly, “Rev killed Pap” (Ijames 2023, p. 141). In a pique of anger, Rev eats a rib, and when he lunges at Juicy in a fit of masculine rage after Juicy rebuts “Let the devil take him,” he begins to choke (Ijames 2023, p. 145). Rev’s choking stretches to an almost absurd interval, both shocking and comedic, but entirely unmissable (Ijames calls it “baroque”) (Ijames 2023, p. 147). Yet what is not comedic is the cause of Rev’s death. Juicy attempts to perform the Heimlich maneuver on Rev several times, but each time, the stage directions convey, Rev “pushes him away” employing “a kind of choking-man’s charades” that communicate to those within Fat Ham and those in the seats watching the play “that he ‘don’t want Juicy touching him.’ Which is of course foolish…you know, toxic masculinity is a helluva drug” (Ijames 2023, p. 146). Ijames’s stage directions thus expose, without question, how Rev’s adherence to the Black male racial script of toxic masculinity leads to his homophobia, and how that homophobia in turn leads to his harm. For as Tedra begs Rev to stop resisting Juicy, Rev “indicates nonverbally” that he will not accept Juicy’s help “‘Cause that nigga gay’” (Ijames 2023, p. 147). Rev’s homophobia literally proves to be the death of him. When juxtaposed with the moving imagery expressed by Larry, the ramifications of Rev’s adherence to heterosexist racial scripts makes express that Fat Ham refuses such scripts, insisting rather on the thriving and humanizing nature of the queer and the obstructive, dehumanizing nature of the anti-queer.

6. Refusal 4: Shakespearean and Anti-Black Tragedy

A father murdered in prison who returns as a ghost to plague his son. A woman who is so invested in appearances and moral living that she remains relationally estranged from her queer children. A second mother who admits she remarried quickly because she does not like to be alone, having only ever moved from her father’s home to her husband’s. An uncle who has murdered his brother and torments his nephew, then dies choking on a rib. A young man (Juicy) who publicly outs another (Larry) in order to feel less alone. Even though these instances typically unfold in Fat Ham with a dash of humor, this catalog illustrates why one might dismiss Fat Ham as another entry in the oeuvre of trauma dramas. Whether depicted with a smile or a frown, suffering is still suffering. And such suffering takes on heightened significance because, as established above, Black trauma is a longstanding racial script. As the metatheatrical language of Fat Ham’s final moments reveals, however, Ijames knows this history, and as Fat Ham closes, he has the characters outrightly reject it. The racial scripts of respectability, masculinity, and queerness all return and likewise get rescripted. For in perhaps his most significant and resistant adaptive decision, Ijames stages a conscious refusal of Black trauma, closing instead with an ending that insists on the restorative presence of Black joy.

With its brooding central character, Hamlet and its eponymous protagonist’s tragic plight is not an obvious site for locating joy. Indeed, Hamlet more likely evokes anxiety—about the ghost’s real nature, about damnation and the afterlife, about scopic surveillance, and, as scholars like Peter Erickson, Ian Smith, Arthur L. Little, Jr., Eric De Barros, and David Sterling Brown have shown, about race. Erickson argues that ethnic allusions work alongside“deep imagery regarding whiteness” (Erickson 2013, p. 210) to expose a persistent anxiety in Hamlet about whiteness’s “vulnerability” (Erickson 2013, p. 210). Ian Smith delves further into Hamlet’s allusions, arguing that Hamlet allays his moral anxieties by repeatedly using imagery that exposes his “assumption of an essential, racialized black violence” (Smith 2022, p. 141), thereby associating Blackness with violence in a rhetorical elision of the reality of white violence. Arthur L. Little, Jr. explores how white people negotiate the racial anxiety caused by whiteness’s vulnerability, arguing that they self-fashion whiteness as unmarked and universal (Little 2016, p. 92), with Hamlet serving the “white melancholic subject” who “becomes the modern subject, abstracted and universalized, the end and the beginning of a historical, humanist teleology” (Little 2016, p. 93). Eric De Barros builds on Little’s reading, connecting this universalizing tactic with anxiety about competing frameworks for morality in the play. De Barros therefore suggests that the discursive blackening of King Hamlet creates a distinction between father and son in which Hamlet fashions himself into “an unmarked, abstracted, universal, and therefore innocent white self” (De Barros 2023, p. 172) in contrast with his father’s “un-Christian qualities” (De Barros 2023, p. 168). David Sterling Brown connects race in Hamlet to anxiety about masculinity, asserting,“Hamlet dramatizes Denmark’s deterioration through the breakdown, or decomposition, of white masculinity” by coding “unmanliness as black” (D. S. Brown 2023, p. 69). Each of these arguments reveals how in Hamlet, Blackness becomes a social, discursive, and ideological marker for projecting onto and therefore displacing the instabilities of whiteness, which ultimately results in a concerted devaluation of Blackness. In short, Hamlet has been a potent cultural and artistic site for the dissemination of historically pervasive and decidedly tragic racial scripts.

Yet Fat Ham does not succumb to the pull of the tragic and its attendant trauma because Ijames chooses to appropriate and rescript rather than simply restage Hamlet. As a result, Fat Ham’s characters in turn decide to rescript the performance of their Black identities. After Rev’s death, Fat Ham becomes self-consciously metatheatrical and self-referential, with Tio even noting his approximation to Horatio (Ijames 2023, p. 149). The characters stare at the audience while Juicy divulges that, according to tragedy’s generic parameters as exemplified by Hamlet, “All of us are supposed to die.” It is, in fact, what “they [the audience] think bout to happen” (Ijames 2023, p. 149). The invocations of Hamlet make it clear that generic expectations of tragedy inform the characters here. Thus, when Tedra pushes back, asking, “Who says we gotta die?” (Ijames 2023, p. 149), Juicy replies, “It’s how these kinds of things [i.e., tragedies] end” (Ijames 2023, p. 149). But I propose that while this dialogue refers to the structural expectations associated with tragedic narratives, it can also refer to America’s racial scripts. A study published in JAMA that took data from men, women, and children exposes that between 1999 and 2020, “The Black population had 1.63 million excess deaths, representing more than 80 million years of potential life lost over the study period” (Caraballo et al. 2023). These numbers mean that U.S. Black mortality “stagnated and then worsened” (Caraballo et al. 2023), especially because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet where was the society-wide response to such a study? There was none. After all, death has long been part of the trauma racial script. And so has the Black family’s so-called pathology, as scholars such as Hortense Spillers, bell hooks, and Cathy Cohen, to name but a few, have shown. Thus, while “these kinds of things” most obviously means tragedies like Hamlet, it could at the same time mean the supposedly aberrant dynamics of the Black family, a longstanding stereotype circulated by America’s white supremacist culture. For Fat Ham’s characters to reject death, then, is to take a stance against the scripts offered up by Shakespeare and America alike.

To unequivocally convey this rejection, Ijames has the characters attempt to perform tragedy as they literally undertake a failed killing of each other full of half-hearted screaming and with props as intimidating as a plastic fork or a pork rib. The performance fails. The stage directions make clear, “It’s ridiculous. But ultimately charming and cathartic” (Ijames 2023, p. 150). When Juicy suggests that they commit to the performance, Opal refuses. Juicy may believe “We tragic,” but she retorts, “I’m not. Look, you see me thriving right now! I’m figuring shit out” (Ijames 2023, p. 151). This is the turning point. Opal gives herself and the others permission to reject expectations and embrace thriving. Because they “feel lighter” (Ijames 2023, p. 152), they go ahead and “carry on” (Ijames 2023, p. 152). With the refusal of Shakespeare’s and America’s traumatic scripts, the space and time for Black joy arrives.

Black scholars, artists, and practitioners stress that Black joy is equal parts positivity and complexity, an intentional method of grappling with a harrowing history of displacement, marginalization, and profound pain while striving to build a thriving personal and communal future. It is no wonder that Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts characterizes Black joy as “a weapon” that “not only deeply disturbs the racist systems we are trying to dismantle but also offers a direct path to healing and wholeness as we do so” (Lewis-Giggetts 2022, p. xvi). Michelle Grace Williams defines Black joy as “a state of psychic contentment […] an experience of racial pride despite the deficit narratives about Black identity” (Williams 2022, pp. 370–72). Williams makes clear that Black joy is not apolitical nor a denial of Black struggles but instead “a refusal to be defined by them” (Williams 2022, p. 372). That is why Lewis-Giggetts insists, “Our joy and our trauma both sit on a continuum. There isn’t’ one or the other. There isn’t a binary. The complexities of our experiences means that our joy can live just underneath pain. In fact, it can live alongside it…. It’s the sense of hope; the feeling that something good can come out of the bad” (Lewis-Giggetts 2022, p. xix). In Nekeisha Alayna Alexis’s words, Black joy “is keenly aware of tragedy and fear, especially generated by White supremacy, combined as it often is with patriarchy, economic exploitation, heterosexism, and so on. But even as it is familiar with heartache and keeps an eye on its adversaries, even as it has known bitterness, Black Joy chooses, savors, and inhabits the very, very sweet” (Alexis 2020, p. 53). Black joy empowers pro-Blackness because it “allows Black people to be more than their struggles and setbacks, and to see Black folx creativity, imagination, healing, and ingenuity as a vital part of antiracism” (Dunn and Love 2020, p. 191). At its core, Black Joy is a resistive refusal of the trauma inflicted by white supremacy and a concomitant insistence on the depth, fullness, and profound value of Black life—a value established not by the terms of white supremacy, but by Black life itself.

As Fat Ham closes, it is this very Black joy that takes over, providing an antidote to the trauma that is woven throughout the rest of the play. It is important to note that even if Fat Ham insistently refuses racial scripts, that does not inherently prevent it from falling into the trauma drama mode. A performance can critique oppression, but without presenting more than suffering, it risks reiterating the trauma racial script even as it launches that criticism. At the same time, acknowledging this trauma functions as an essential facet of Black joy, moving it from an affect of anodyne happiness that passively ignores racism’s vicious effects to one of profound agential defiance. The staging of Black joy at the end of Fat Ham is thus one more, and perhaps the most vital, refusal, an essential facet that cements for audiences the paucity of extant racial scripts. Initially, the joy on stage is simple as they all sit down to “eat” and “talk shit” (Ijames 2023, p. 153) as a way of affirming their refusal of tragedy. They have not died or murdered each other, so they can break bread together, thereby illustrating Shanelle E. Kim’s claim that “community—especially communities of eating—is how Fat Ham rewrites the tragedies of generational violence and systems of oppression” (Kim 2022, p. 546). The stage directions speak to this different sense of self and each other, “They are all much more in their bodies. They all seem more at ease. Happier. Calmer. It’s beautiful. It’s a good fucking time” (Ijames 2023, p. 153). The real world slides into a sort of fantasy when, in the Broadway playtext at least, Rev revives to join them at the table. Fractured interpersonal relationships have been set aside. As these Black mothers, father, cousins, and friends sit around the table, they instantiate the politics of joy, for “joy foregrounds a flourishing relation of the self to the self (or, in the case of Black joy, how Black folks relate to each other)” (Stewart 2023, p. 9). To be clear, this is not a moment of fully realized liberatory politics. For instance, there is no confrontation of the harm Rev has caused his family. In fact, the closest the scene comes to staging a reconciliation comes through Rabby. Previously, she has divulged that she used to be an exotic dancer in her youth, an admission indicating that she has found a way to let go of respectability and its demands. It is therefore fitting that when Tedra inquires about Larry, Rabby affectionately replies, “Oh let me go on in the house and see about my baby” (Ijames 2023, p. 153). Alongside Rabby’s uncharacteristic admission, this line suggests that she has let go of the politics of respectability in order to value and embrace who her son truly is. Even so, it is worth noting that the scene does not demand of the characters any confession of wrongdoing or request for forgiveness. Essentially, then, this is joy as respite, a pause, a moment between the trauma and the hard work potentially to come—and Rabby’s line suggests it is to come—so as to move forward together.

The actual conclusion of Fat Ham takes this instance of quiet joy and amplifies it, performing the extravagant hope that Black joy offers. In a scene of unexpected joy, Larry emerges from the house in full drag, announcing, “I’m here” (Ijames 2023, p. 154). What follows is an impromptu dance party full of costume changes, flashing lights, and celebratory music that finds all the characters celebrating Larry’s coming out. It is a moment that Lauren Robertson reads as a type of resurrection, one deployed “toward this envisioning of a joyful, alternative future” (Robertson 2024, p. 174). I have purposely been speaking in generalities because the production choices across Fat Hams are quite different.11 And I think they might be especially so in this final moment given that Ijames offers only general stage directions full of the word “maybe.” Nor does he delineate how long the final scene should last, only that it should “move from something normal to something sublime” (Ijames 2023, p. 154). Let me share, however, some details from two different performances of Fat Ham (2024, 2025) I watched. The first is the performance by the Wilma Theater that I streamed on 28 February 2024. Larry wore a blue skirt, a floral bolero, pearl earrings, flowers on his head, and gold sequin platform shoes. The lighting changed to club-like party lighting, and flowers blossomed everywhere, with Juicy wearing a flower crown. Opal took off her dress. Juicy affirmed Larry, remarking, “You look like yourself.” Rabby fully accepted Larry, embracing him and declaring, “Then I guess everybody has to take up their own armor of God.” Tio put on floral garlands, and it was in this explosion of forgiveness and fecundity that they chanted Rev back to life, with a flower blooming out of his mouth as he revived, after which he embraced Juicy. In every way, then, all the characters appeared to choose “pleasure over harm,” as Tio had previously advocated for in his gingerbread man drug-induced fever dream (Ijames 2023, p. 139). In the second performance—at the Goodman Theater in Chicago on 27 February 2025—Larry emerged in platforms, a red gingham romper with an enormous Elizabethan ruff, and wearing glittering red lipstick. Strobe lights shone, and Juicy donned a bedazzled leather jacket referencing Hamlet. The two sat on the table, took each other in, and kissed as the others danced in delight. These were very different stagings of the same scene. Yet they are similar in ways that matter most, essentially, in the way Black joy comes through as the racial scripts of respectability, toxic masculinity, and anti-queerness are decidedly refused. Larry’s dramatic removal of his Naval uniform, for instance, indicates that the expectations of both respectability and traditional masculinity obstruct his thriving. He can only be his true self without them. To don drag instead heightens such a decision, for it celebrates Larry’s queerness in an unassailable way. He has found the softness that he longs for. Perhaps, as in one production, this softness allows for him to connect with his mother. Perhaps, as in the other, it creates a romantic comedy-style ending when Larry and Juicy’s kiss functions as the play’s dénouement. Regardless, as Ijames’s stage directions suggest, “Drag, fashion, camp, delight are all at your disposal,” for as it ends, Fat Ham “cracks open into a celebration of the feminine” (Ijames 2023, p. 154). I would add to Ijames’s stage directions of the feminine and the queer. Thus, this moment of Black joy—of dancing, reuniting, celebration, camp, and pleasure—serves as an unmissable denunciation of the toxic, heterosexist, racist scripts that have diminished Black lives within the play over its 90 minutes and outside of the play for far too long.

For some viewers, critics, and scholars, Fat Ham may be engaging but not revolutionary enough to be considered a play that stages resistance. Admittedly, the play does not offer a wholly new narrative as it veers toward (even as it ultimately swerves away from) trauma drama. Nor does Ijames choose to direct attention within Fat Ham to tackling systemic oppression. Nonetheless, while Fat Ham achieves something more modest, it is still important, for there is value in rescripting the cultural stalwart that is Shakespeare in order to refuse and therefore rescript conceptualizations of race. For Black audiences, this rescripting opens up the potential for the play to achieve Ijames’s aim of “accommodate[ing] and even celebrat[ing] multiple experiences from a wide array of audience identities,” including diverse Black identities differentiated by gender, age, sexuality, education, ideologies, affects, and desires but who likely share the experience of not seeing themselves either accommodated nor celebrated regularly in Western culture (Sherman forthcoming, p. 53). For white audiences, this same rescripting “rather uncannily—as if it had anticipated this very circumstance—cultivates careful strategies of engaging and subverting the expectations of white viewers,” as Donovan Sherman astutely argues (Sherman forthcoming, p. 53). Sherman notes, for instance, how even as the characters ”know they themselves could become ‘black and grained spots’ in a dramatic exploration of their guilt” as a result of the white audience’s “literacy, their knowledge of Hamlet as a supposed pretext, and the danger over overlaying racial expectations onto the tragic affordance of Shakespeare’s play,” ultimately, “Juicy, Pap, and Tedra deny access to their own interiorities and leave white spectators hanging, suddenly aware of their typically unmarked wishes to position themselves above the Black performers on display” (Sherman forthcoming, p. 60). Through a range of adaptive strategies—including casting, characterization, music, costuming and carefully considered plotting and staging—Fat Ham illustrates what can be achieved thematically, structurally, and artistically even when Black art must be created within comprised systems like that of American theater and Shakespeare.

It is perhaps more vital now than ever to meditate on such possibilities. Contemporary Shakespearean performances developed for American theater that strive to reflect and advance social justice aims face myriad challenges, from institutions losing the stomach for the labor and capital necessary to enact the types of changes demanded by WSYWAT, to the drying up of federal funding for art invested in equity, to audiences emboldened by culture to dismiss such striving as “woke.” The pressures against racial resistance are proliferating. When facing such an onslaught, artists and scholars may find hope in the fact that resistance can take many forms, even ostensibly small ones. Accordingly, adrienne maree brown posits the concept of emergent strategy; when crisis is pervasive, she argues, we must remember that small actions can work together to create complex systems, systems that lead to intentional, liberatory change. Essentially, in the face of seemingly overwhelming forces, “small is all” (A. M. Brown 2017, p. 41). Imani Perry notes that one such small thing art offers is a bolstering of the emotional fortitude required for the fight against injustice. She observes, “Above all, it [art] buoys the spirit, enabling us to continue to press for a better future, but also to imagine what that future might be by refusing the idea that our bodies are fated for abuse and destruction” (Perry 2025, p. 40). More specifically, she suggests that it is the joy brought to us by art that “keeps us going when terror feels overwhelming” (Perry 2025, p. 40). As it rejects abusive and destructive racial scripts by insisting on an audience’s recognition of Black identity’s complexity, resilience, and joy, Fat Ham serves as precisely that type of art. Though a drama perhaps small, through its rescripting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and racial scripts alike, Fat Ham offers up the imagination, beauty, and truth essential for crafting the liberatory future of Black art that Du Bois imagined. Just as vitally, through these rescriptings, Fat Ham realizes the spirit-filling function of art so crucial for confronting injustice in this contemporary moment.