Hamlet, like many characters in Shakespeare’s plays, often speaks directly to the audience to share his thoughts with us. He tells us about his plans, but he could just as easily be thinking aloud as he begins to lose touch with reality. This is not the case for Fat Ham’s Juicy, who turns to speak directly to us (the audience) in the printed play script and in the digital, off-Broadway, and Broadway productions. Juicy’s use of soliloquy could be one of the most faithful structural aspects of James Ijames’s adaptation of Hamlet, but the façade of any antiquated use of this theatrical device is shattered immediately after Juicy finishes his first speech. At its conclusion, the ghost of Pap asks his son, “What you tell them?” The fact that other characters are aware that Juicy can speak to the audience is a shift in the world of the play that is part of what allows us to see a familiar story from a new perspective. Following Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer phenomenology, which posits that queer people are literally oriented differently in space and therefore see things in new ways that reveal new facets of familiar things, this essay will argue that Fat Ham’s soliloquies queer Hamlet’s original structure in ways that create space for queer, Black collectivity, and utopia. Ijames reclaims soliloquies as a part of theatre culture by transforming them into something both familiar and radically new.

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“You see what happened there?”: Soliloquies, Reality Confessionals, and Queer Phenomenology in Fat Ham

  • Bess Rowen

摘要

Hamlet, like many characters in Shakespeare’s plays, often speaks directly to the audience to share his thoughts with us. He tells us about his plans, but he could just as easily be thinking aloud as he begins to lose touch with reality. This is not the case for Fat Ham’s Juicy, who turns to speak directly to us (the audience) in the printed play script and in the digital, off-Broadway, and Broadway productions. Juicy’s use of soliloquy could be one of the most faithful structural aspects of James Ijames’s adaptation of Hamlet, but the façade of any antiquated use of this theatrical device is shattered immediately after Juicy finishes his first speech. At its conclusion, the ghost of Pap asks his son, “What you tell them?” The fact that other characters are aware that Juicy can speak to the audience is a shift in the world of the play that is part of what allows us to see a familiar story from a new perspective. Following Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer phenomenology, which posits that queer people are literally oriented differently in space and therefore see things in new ways that reveal new facets of familiar things, this essay will argue that Fat Ham’s soliloquies queer Hamlet’s original structure in ways that create space for queer, Black collectivity, and utopia. Ijames reclaims soliloquies as a part of theatre culture by transforming them into something both familiar and radically new.