An expert on Shakespeare and race reviews ‘Fat Ham’ at the Wilma Theater

Ania Loomba

Penn English professor

Fat Ham isn’t really an adaptation, in my view. I think one critic somewhere said Hamlet is a provocation for this production. It’s not really redoing Hamlet. An adaptation should make you rethink the original. I think that this is very much making Hamlet your own, doing its own thing.

Ania Loomba

Having said that, it did retrospectively make me think about its point of intersection with the original. Hamlet is not the usual, stereotypical man of action. He’s seen as somebody who’s unable to take revenge, unable to bear arms, right? And so is Juicy (Brenson Thomas), for different reasons. Hamlet says, “O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.” That’s not part of Juicy’s burden. He’s not highborn. Hamlet’s failure to take revenge and Claudius becoming king has repercussions for all of Denmark. In this case, it’s really taking it into the family. Something is rotten in wherever we substitute for Denmark, which is a particular culture of masculinity and violence. At the end of Hamlet, everybody’s dead. He can’t do it. Juicy won’t.

Ania Loomba

His friend Tio says, “These cycles of violence are like deep, engrained, hell, engineered.” Before that was slavery and inherited trauma. The play definitely asks us to think not just about sexuality, but those cultures of violence in sexual terms, in race terms, and class terms.

Ania Loomba

Juicy was raised in “pig guts and bad choices.” These choices are not in absolute terms, they’re relative. The mother, Tedra (Donnie Hammond), chooses to remarry and says she’s never been without a man. Clearly, these are bad choices. It’s one more cycle of being dominated by a pretty horrendous man, but she feels that she has no choice but to get married.

Ania Loomba

Precisely. It’s not her fault as an individual, it’s part of a structure where women don’t have too many choices beyond that. I really liked Opal (Jessica Johnson), just the way she communicated both her position within the family and her own choices. She felt like she could be a character in The Wire.

Ania Loomba

My first reaction was, “I don’t want it.” But you’re part of it. I put my hands up — and then I realized that’s part of the whole experience, whether you want it or not. You’re not just a spectator. There’s a lot of burden on Juicy to carry the play and I thought that was beautifully done by Brenson Thomas. Tedra, Opal, and Juicy stood out to me. All of them would be great Shakespearean actors. When Juicy delivered the few lines from Hamlet, it wasn’t done with pompousness. It was so clear you could understand everything, and that takes some doing because those lines are not crafted to modern speech. He switched into different types of speech easily and knit them together so beautifully.

Ania Loomba

It was smart of the play not to give us the “To be, or not to be” speech. I know Hamlet is many people’s favorite play but reading it as a woman in India, I always felt it was fetishized too much. It’s great that someone refuses to take Hamlet that seriously.

Ania Loomba

The stage direction says, “The play cracks open into a celebration of the feminine.” It’s not prescriptive. It’s like a forced ending, because that’s how it is in Shakespeare — they don’t necessarily bring to a close what’s happened, and they’re formulaic. Fat Ham doesn’t have the burden of being realistic, and it doesn’t want to take on that burden.