The Old Globe’s season of Pulitzer Prize winners continues with Fat Ham, which won the award for Drama in 2022. Earlier this year we produced English, the 2023 winner, in the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre, and with The Age of Innocence, in this space a few months ago, Karen Zacarías adapted Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer-winning novel for the stage. The centrality of Shakespeare to the Globe’s identity reminds us that we’re a playwright’s theatre, and it’s an honor and a pleasure to share such great contemporary writing for the stage, written by Shakespeare’s artistic progeny, with our audiences.

The Pulitzer judges cited Fat Ham with this apt description: “A funny, poignant play that deftly transposes Hamlet to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty.” The play has since entered the American repertoire, and the Globe is delighted that our production is the original, which started at New York’s Public Theater and then went to Broadway. Saheem Ali’s original direction is recreated and enriched by the brilliant Sideeq Heard, making his Globe debut, and we are thrilled to welcome an artist who is sure to emerge as a major figure in our field. Certainly he’s assembled a cast as wildly talented as any we’ve had on our stage—we welcome them, too.

Fat Ham’s author, James Ijames, is also a friend of the Globe. A few years ago I was fortunate to make a podcast called “Where There’s a Will: Finding Shakespeare,” which explored the ways that Shakespeare shapes American culture by appearing in places other than the theatre. I made an episode about what was then an explosion of Hamlets: there was a Hamlet opera at the Metropolitan, a Hamlet-inspired film called The Northman in cinemas, the Globe’s own Hamlet on the Radio on public airwaves, and Fat Ham. I interviewed artists involved in all of them, including Ijames, who was fascinating on the genesis and meaning of his play.

Ijames made a point that really struck me at the time, and still does a few years later. He noted that at that moment of churn in American life—just post-pandemic—all of us were reckoning with the legacies we’d inherited from many places. From history, from culture, from nature, and from family. The question, Ijames said, is always whether to honor these legacies or release them. That is, one way to read Hamlet’s famous question, “To be or not to be,” is to reframe it in terms of the things that shape us: will we be what our histories determine, or will we break free of our inheritances and refashion ourselves in some new way? Ijames said that for him, the key word in Hamlet’s line is “be,” and that the “question” is really about how to be, not whether to be.

That bracing insight is at the center of Fat Ham. Ijames shows us a new Hamlet in a new context, transplanting the melancholy hero from a castle in Denmark to a backyard in a Southern American town, and reconceptualizing him as a queer Black man wrestling with the cultural currents and assumptions of our moment. He makes of Shakespeare something surprising and fresh. That this writer does this while also being raucously, outrageously, scabrously funny is nothing short of miraculous, especially since Hamlet isn’t exactly a laugh riot. It’s great that this Hamlet is named Juicy, because that’s precisely what this play is. I admire it immensely. It’s the kind of achievement that earns, and deserves, accolades. The Globe is delighted to have it here.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.

Barry Edelstein is the Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director of The Old Globe.

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