Joan Marcus
This is an amended version of a review that first appeared on May 26, 2022.
The flight of the checkered tablecloth is the first shock. It’s as if a diaphanous paper plane has suddenly shot across the stage. This is a ghost, the first ding of Hamlet in the fabric of James Ijames’ reimagining of that Shakespeare play, Fat Ham, which won 2022’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and is now on Broadway (American Airlines Theatre, booking to June 25).
The play, a co-production of the National Black Theatre and New York City’s Public Theater—where it played with the same cast last year—is set not in the Danish court of yore, but in the present day at a Southern backyard barbecue celebration of the wedding of Tedra (Nikki Crawford), who’s Gertrude-adjacent, and her dead husband’s brother, Rev (Billy Eugene Jones), a kind of Claudius.