Fat Ham.
It’s tricky to write about a play that you watched a week ago because what you like about it becomes somewhat hazy and abstract. Or maybe your memory of the experience in general gets hazy, or maybe your memory would be hazy even if you wrote about it the next day because in general you have a very rapidly hazy memory, or at least I do. If you asked me what happened in Fat Ham, even though it was very intentionally structured and very well written, I might stall a little as I answered you, stutter and wonder what’s important to include and how do I recall it on the spot, line up something like a story in my answer. If I had to answer, I would say that Fat Ham is about someone who is working through the tension of the culture in his hometown, in his family, and the culture he has cultivated for himself. His own way of being is in friction with who others expect him to be. If the play orbits identity and coming to grips with who you are despite obstacles then what makes Fat Ham a fantastic play is its ability to make you think about these themes—plus death, family, love—without the experience ever quite feeling like a downer. Instead, you laugh and you lean forward and try to anticipate what’s going to happen next.
I loved Fat Ham because, for a play about Black people that’s funny, it is not making fun of Black people. It is a love letter—it seems—to all of the people like the people on stage, many of whom are in the crowd, laughing along. It is the difference, maybe, of laughing at and laughing with, the difference between something like minstrelsy and something like satire—it’s about who the jokes are for and how the specificity of the jokes, the seeing they require, makes them funnier than if they were based on assumptions.
I loved the humor in Fat Ham and the way it thinks about audience. I also loved how incredible the actors on stage were in their efforts to make the characters come alive. The play was on Broadway and it won a Pulitzer and I think that the actors in this Atlanta season bring that sort of energy to the production. I love plays for how campy they can feel and how they’re happening live. I guess I haven’t gone to many plays that were really exceptional in their acting and so I expect a bit of imperfection, have learned to see it as more endearing than annoying. That said, I was like jaw-dropped surprised by being presented with a group of actors who were as flawless as people on TV, people who have multiple chances at getting the perfect shot, at rendering the characters as thoroughly and precisely as they ought to be. The actors in Fat Ham were hugely entertaining both in how they animated the characters and how gorgeously they embodied them in the moment.
When I think about the play, I think—in abstract hazy fashion—about how it felt warm to sit there watching Black people tell a story like this. It’s a deep story and a weird story and a fun one. We were in a little theatre that was unassuming in its casual, unassigned seating, and yet were presented with a performance that buzzed, that could have contained the energy and expectations of a much grander space. It was nice that the theatre was small though, and it was nice to see a play, especially considering how alive it felt, and how alive theatre feels in general, with the inability to watch a trailer first, to skip through the story, to rewind. You just have to sit and see what there is to see, and sometimes, what you’re presented with is something so bright and magnetic that a week later, you’re still wondering how you can communicate the feeling.
Image: Alliance Theatre
