Yes, Juicy is a mama’s boy (with the bedazzled t-shirt to prove it) who’s smarting from the murder of his father and his mother’s sudden marriage to his uncle.
What elevates Ijames’ one-act play, and earned him the Pulitzer Prize for drama earlier this month, is how he truly recognizes Hamlet’s experience for a modern age rife with homophobia, racial injustice and the legacies of violence passed down through generations. “Fat Ham,” which opened Thursday at the Public Theater in a co-production with National Black Theatre, is not just a sit-com version of the Bard, with our hero’s pal Horatio recast as the stoner Tio (Chris Herbie Holland) and Polonius as an outwardly prim church lady with a secretly raunchy past (Benja Kay Thomas).
