In May of this year, James Ijames won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Fat Ham, a bawdy, Black, funny, and unabashedly queer adaptation (of sorts) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Set on a North Carolina pig farm, the play closely follows the beats of the famous tragedy but remixes them into a meditation on masculinity, sexuality, mourning, and joy. Juicy, the play’s protagonist and Hamlet stand-in, is a fat Black queer boy who has just seen the ghost of his father, Pap. Pap has returned to earth for revenge: He claims that his brother, Juicy’s uncle Rev, murdered him in order to marry his wife, Tedra, and visits Juicy on the afternoon of a cookout celebrating their union to demand Juicy kill Rev. Early in the play, Juicy…
