By Jerome Langston

“James Ijames is one of the best actors that you will ever see in your life,” surprisingly says Chicago-based play director, Jerrell L. Henderson, who is in town to direct Ijames’s best-known play, Fat Ham, for Virginia Stage Company’s current 46th season. It’s a cool, mid-week evening in early January, and the director and his lead actor, Marcus Antonio, are joining me for an extended interview, within a dimly lit lobby inside Norfolk’s elegant Wells Theatre. The two artists have just wrapped up a full day of rehearsal — but still appear remarkably full of energy. The lively, shared conversation that unfolds with both men over about an hour inside the theatre, is replete with stories about 90s black sitcoms, American history, black theater icons, and quite a bit more.

Jerrell’s story about Ijames’s early days as an acting student at the prestigious Temple University, where the Philly native first caught the future award-winning playwright in a college production, is one of several that illustrates how the two acclaimed theatre-makers have experienced parallel trajectories in American theater — and is especially notable as Black, openly queer men. “We were in Philly with Reverie, and Fat Ham was opening at The Public. We opened and then like two- or three-days later, Fat Ham won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama,” says Jerrell, who directed Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky, at VSC last season.

“I’m just really excited to be here, and happy. And I just want to make sure that I do everything I can to set everybody up for success,” says the director. “To be in a room with a bunch of black actors who are happy to be here. And I’m happy to be here, at a theatre company that’s gonna do what they can to make sure we create the best project… That is ideal,” he adds. “We don’t always get that, in our business.” VSC’S production of Fat Ham is actually a co-production with Richmond’s acclaimed Virginia Repertory Theatre, where the show will run for 3 weeks in March, following its premiere and run here at the Wells.

Fat Ham premiered off-Broadway at The Public Theater in May 2022, and received astonishingly rave reviews. It opened on Broadway on April 12, 2023 at the American Airlines Theatre, and ran through July 2nd of the same year. The play had already received its Pulitzer Prize the year prior, and added five Tony Award nominations in 2023. Marcel Spears portrayed the lead role of Juicy in both NYC productions, while actor Calvin Leon Smith played Larry, and Billy Eugene Jones took on both Pap and Rev. The New York Times adorned the Broadway production with its Critic’s Pick distinction, and writer Jesse Green, in his April 2023 review, wrote “that Fat Ham achieves its happy, even joyful, ending honestly, without denying the weight of forces that make Hamlet feel just as honest, is a sign of how capacious and original the writing is, growing the skin of its own necessity instead of merely burrowing into Shakespeare’s.”

Both a clever and modern adaptation of William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy Hamlet, Fat Ham is the most successful of the considerable works of playwright James Ijames, who grew up in North Carolina, and whose other plays like The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, and Good Bones, have also received critical praise. He teaches theatre at Villanova University. “I take his work very seriously because there aren’t a whole lot of contemporary playwrights, particularly in the African American community, whose work I feel like I get,” says Jerrell, who also admires the work of Tarell Alvin McCraney.

Juicy is the Prince Hamlet of James’s story, but as a young, Black queer man, who is attending a backyard barbecue thrown by his Southern black family, he confronts issues that are unique to his intersectional identity, though there are still many clever parallels to the story of Hamlet. “Fat Ham, at its core, is about breaking generational chains of self-hatred, homophobia, misogyny — but particularly toxic masculinity,” says Jerrell, later in our conversation. “And it does it using satire. It’s a satire. I love satire,” adds the director, who is also a well-regarded puppeteer and archivist.

The cast of seven actors in this Virginia co-production, include Janae Thompson as Opal, Kevin Craig West as Pap/Rev, Jordan Pearson as Larry, and Adam E. Moskowitz plays Tio. Adam is locally based as a member of NSU Theatre Company, and has appeared in numerous VSC and NSU Theatre co-productions, including Henry V and Dreamgirls. But the coveted lead role of Juicy, is being occupied by VSC newbie, Marcus Antonio, who has been patiently waiting for me to ask him a question — any question, about his role in this fascinating, comedic play. “He’s not ashamed of who he is, even though everyone else casts shame upon him,” says the actor, regarding what he respects about Juicy. “He still stands in his confidence.”

The cast is still in the phase of going through the one-act play, page by page, to make sure that everyone fully understands the work. During this process that the director calls “The Long Walk,” Marcus has discovered even more similarities between himself and his atypical character. “Juicy asks so many questions. Almost his first reaction to everything is a question,” says the Georgia native, who is now based in NYC. He is also a thinker, who loves asking questions of people.

Black music and cuisine are a central part of the Fat Ham story, acknowledges Jerrell towards the end of our chat. And he says that the play is “gonna end with a dance party.” He wants the audience to walk out of the theatre experiencing black joy, despite the play’s weighty themes of generational trauma. “I hope that when the audience leaves here, they leave here feeling lighter.”

Special Thank You to VEER Magazine and Jerome Langston for their constant support of Virginia Stage Company. Read the full article, and show support to them here.