A trailer for the 2021 Wilma Theater presentation of Fat Ham, written by Philadelphia playwright James Ijames. It won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A South Philadelphia playwright has earned a Pulitzer Prize for an adaptation of a William Shakespeare classic that was developed, first-publicly read, and ultimately performed through a group of Center City theater companies.
James Ijames’ play “Fat Ham” received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama on Monday.
"I just like felt all of the blood rushed out of my hands, like I couldn’t use my hands," Ijames said about the moment he found out about the award.
"I was just sort of in shock, stupefied by it. It’s just a thing you don’t expect to hear on a Monday."
Ijames said that after he got his wits about him following the initial shock, he called his mother back in North Carolina.
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"It still feels very overwhelming and kind of surreal," he said. "But I'm very happy."
His version of "Hamlet" is a faraway journey from the court of Denmark in the latter part of the Middle Ages.
"The play that I wrote," said Ijames, "is a very, very, very loose adaptation of 'Hamlet.'"
Related Jawncast: Going in-depth with Pulitzer winner James Ijames.
It reenvisions the classic play through the story of Juicy, a young queer Black man, at a family backyard barbecue in the southern United States. In the play, a ghost of Juicy’s father asks him to kill his uncle as revenge for his own death, but it takes a very different pathway from the original.
The Pulitzer Prize describes how the play grapples with “questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty.”
“What does the 'Hamlet' narrative look like if it’s queered, and if it’s infiltrated and taken over by people of color?” Ijames said in a preview of the Wilma Theater’s streamed presentation of the play in 2021. The play was filmed in Virginia before it was streamed.
“Fat Ham is a prayer for queer people who can’t give voice to their affection, who wish that they could ‘dissolve,’” Ijames added in the playwright’s notes of the Wilma Theater presentation.
“The prayer is asking for liberation, for families that learn, for language that hasn’t yet been coined that is needed to describe your lived experience, for softness in brutal spaces, for pleasure that withstands pain.”
Related Jawncast: A fully-rebooted presentation of "Oklahoma"
Ijames is the co-artistic director of the Wilma Theater and an associate professor of theater at Villanova University.
He said his upbringing in North Carolina and his artistic formative years here in Philadelphia helped give him his base for the play.
"I was absolutely influenced by my time here, in particular just working in the theater community. There’s just such a wide variety of types of theater that you can experience in Philadelphia," he said.
"I think all of that diversity of style, that diversity of tastes just had a really big effect on me. So I came of age as an artist here. It's been a place [that has been] very important to my development as an artist."
Ijames began developing the play through Philadelphia’s Azuka Theatre and its New Pages playwriting group, of which Ijames is a member-at-large.
“The first time James brought in scenes from 'Fat Ham,' we read them within the group,” said director and former Azuka Theatre artistic associate Maura Krause.
“Even a bunch of non-actor writers reading couldn't dim the luminous words on the page, and we were left breathlessly awaiting more. When we did an in-house reading of a full draft of 'Fat Ham' with actors a few months later, everyone present was mesmerized by the heartfelt yet subversive genius of the script.”
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”I’m grateful for the loving development and support I’ve been given by Azuka and specifically the role they played in the development of 'Fat Ham,'" Ijames said in a statement.
Azuka Theatre hosted the in-house reading of “Fat Ham” in 2019 and a public reading of the play in 2020 before the Wilma Theater’s streamed presentation one year later.
Ijames won the award over finalists “Selling Kabul” by Sylvia Khoury and “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord” by Kristina Wong.
“Since that first reading in Azuka's conference room, I've hoped 'Fat Ham' gets produced absolutely everywhere,” said Krause. “The world needs it.”
The Public Theater Off-Broadway is giving "Fat Ham" its New York debut on Thursday.
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Azuka Theatre is currently showcasing Ijames’ play "Reverie." They are performing it through May 22 at Proscenium Theatre at the Drake, near the corner of Hicks and Spruce streets in Center City.
Ijames joins George E. Kelly (1926), Charles Fuller (1982), and Quiara Alegría Hudes (2012) as Philadelphians who have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Where is that award going? Ijames is trying to decide if the Pulitzer will go on his desk at Villanova. But his mom back in North Carolina may have a say about that, particularly with the idea of putting it in her dining room china closet where others can see it.
"Maybe I'll do that," Ijames quipped, "and I'll just make a little copy for myself."
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