The family celebrates — among other emotions — in the GableStage edition of Fat Ham (Photos by Magnus Stark)
By Bill Hirschman
One of the minor drawbacks of being a critic is that you usually see a show on opening night. Anyone connected to theater knows that most shows need a full weekend at least for audiences to enjoy the elusive perfection the artists seek.
So know that when Island City Stage opened Fat Ham last month, the entire company produced an entertaining show that was funny, topical, engaging. Yet it felt like an effort in the making.
But as this co-production moved to GableStage this weekend, the four weekends of prior performances and two subsequent weeks of fine-tuning rehearsal have generated a significantly amped up edition that vibrates with dynamic energy.
The increased clarity underscores the copious humor, its philosophy of living and its social themes encompassing race, complex familial relationships and sexual identity.
Again, this isn’t dissing the first round at all, but time and a larger budget and some additional personnel have pushed this onto a crisper level.
Playwright James Ijames’ Fat Ham won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the play received five Tony nominations. But some critics contended the honors were a testament to mainstream white theater’s long-overdue commitment to broaden a full embrace of African-American work.
We meet the young gay man Juicy at his Black family’s backyard barbeque in South Carolina celebrating his mother’s wedding to his uncle — a week after his father was mysteriously murdered.
Yes, this ingenious plot in this tri-company production with Brévo Theatre intentionally glances off touchpoints echoing Shakespeare’s Hamlet which now clearly preaches that people, culture and life remain unchanged in 400 years.
Juicy is equally capable of home boy banter, but he sprinkles it with quotes from the Bard like “Ay, there’s the rub” referring to the barbeque cooking on an outdoor grill. In private monologues, he reworks “to be or not to be” or while lustily admiring a potential lover “What a piece of work is man.”
Some references are point-making serious, some are witty enough to have made Will smile. For instance, when a friend appears wearing luminous sneakers, the buddy says he bought them from a mother raising money for her son’s funeral. The son’s name? Yorick.
Spot more echoes of the Bard.
Juicy (Henry Cadet) is visited by the Little Richard suit-wearing ghost of his father Pap who insists that Juicy’s sneering uncle “the Rev” murdered Pap to wed Juicy’s mother Tedra (Dina Lewis). Of course, the ghost wants Juicy to avenge him.
Now, a week after the murder, the family is celebrating this afternoon’s wedding of his sex-drenched mother Tedra and “the Rev” (Melvin Huffnagle), an overbearing dictator who wants Juicy to learn how to be a hog slaughterer in his barbeque restaurant.
He feels adrift in this family and the world in general. As one writer put it, he’s halfway out of the closet. His father’s charge gives him some direction and definition, although he, like Hamlet, is reluctant.
Juicy acknowledges being gay (“I want to be soft”) amid a distinctly straight group. But on a deeper level, he says alternatively, “I’m a freak… I don’t belong here…. I wish I was special.” Instead, he tells his close buddy Tio (Mikhael Mendoza): “This is what I was raised in: pig guts and bad choices.”
Juicy is a poet of sorts and philosopher familiar with the Dane, but his main dream is to go off to college to become a human resources administrator. Unfortunately, his macho uncle sells off Juicy’s stipend in order to remodel the new couple’s bathroom which is too pink for him.
Joining the crowd at the fest is Tedra’s friend, Rabby (Toddra Brunson) who breaks into a gospel belt at any opportunity, her teenager daughter Opal (Cassidy J. Joseph) who hates being forced to wear a dress, and Larry (Denzel McCausland), Rabby’s son back from the Marines with his own closeted issues.
Of course, a clash is coming, but not quite what you expect. Just rest easy that the finale is a celebratory house-rocking with singing, clapping and the cast joyfully inviting patrons in the front row to dance along with them.
This edition is a better match to the online study guide that claims “The play addresses issues of Southern identity, as well as what it means to be Black and an LGBTQIA+ person in the 21st century. It explores family bonds and expectations while raising questions about the obligations of family loyalty.
But there are plentiful laughs such as when a family member responds to a Bard quote from Juicy with the reproach “You watch too much PBS.”
Ijames’ script skillfully fuses contemporary phraseology and some 16th century language into a rhythm that creates a near-poetic vernacular slang that no white guy would dare try to write.
Once again, director Terrence “TM” Pride, artistic director of Brévo, keeps the night rolling with even more oomph and adding even more bits of visual business. As with most theaters and most productions, GableStage’s Artistic Director Bari Newport added insight. Ijames and Pride have the characters make fun of stereotypes while echoing them.
A few elements are new, starting with casting Lewis. Jervin “Jaystone” Thompson’s set is broadened and spruced up to accommodate GableStage’s wide space, including a window for the older women to spy on the young people. Some of the costumes by Lisa Victoria Coleman have been gussied up a touch.
The performances are much more assured as they bounce among theatrical realism, near lyrical musing, cobalt blue profanity and faux chitlin’ circuit.
All of the cast, many of whom you’ve seen in the ranks of other South Florida productions, enthusiastically inhabit these caricatures – from Lewis’ body-swirling vamp to the terrific Huffnagle’s double duty as the tyrannical Rev and the flashy Pap.
Denzel McCausland and Henry Cadet as cousins exploring a deeper connection
But Cadet, a recent New World grad who must carry us through the evening, shows a marked transformation. At Island City, it took him the first third of the play to plug in, to show Juicy’s sexuality and even then he was mostly just showing promise. This time, he inhabited Juicy and the play immediately with his expressive face and movement, vibrantly alive which is laudable when playing a melancholy Prince.
Throughout, Ijames and Cadet depict someone who feels like an outsider because of how mainstream society views his sexual identity, even as he comes to terms with that conflict himself.
He asks at one point, “What do you do when God don’t want you and the devil won’t have you?”
And under all of it, Ijames and this company slide in philosophical riffs about seeking pleasure in all its senses, especially in a monologue in which Tio relates a dream.
Tribute is due this collection of local producing parties. Island City Stage Artistic Director Andy Rogow read the script in 2021 but wondered if the company could “make it work.” Then the Our Fund Foundation hooked him up with the young Brévo Theatre company to provide a stage for its The Brothers Size. They agreed to co-produce Fat Ham. And then they discovered that Bari Newport at GableStage also was considering the work. She joined the duo. And finally, the Warten Foundation agreed to help support it.
A bit of background on Brévo Theatre, a Miami-Pompano Beach company. It began producing works in 2021 with Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy,
Founded by Zaylin Yates and Terrence Pride at Florida A&M University, it styles itself as “dedicated to amplifying diverse voices in theatre… (that) delve into pressing social issues and celebrate the richness of Black narratives.”
During COVID-19, Brévo responded with Protest Art, a virtual dance series highlighting racial injustice, including Hope For Tomorrow, commissioned by the Adrienne Arsht Center.
Their staging of American Son by local playwright Christopher Demos-Brown featured a talkback titled 2 Shades of Black: An Exploration of Biracial Identity, with the playwright.
For more information about the company, go to https://brevotheatre.org/.
Fat Ham plays at GableStage through June 15, Individual show tickets start at $40. Shows 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Wednesday and Sundays. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit gablestage.org or call (305) 445-1119. Running time is roughly 95 minutes with no intermission. A word of advice: There are no bad seats in the house, but a lot of the action occurs on the right-hand third of the stage (stage left for you professionals.)
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