At the climax of James Ijames’ Fat Ham, the characters reject the idea that, because they are analogs of characters in Hamlet, they must go along with the fates met by those characters. To Juicy’s half-hearted assertion that “We tragic,” Opal retorts, “I’m not”—and instead of a domino sequence of deaths, we get a celebration of continued life and liberated “fabulousness.” This celebration renders the play’s rejection of fixed fates a clear facet of its philosophy. But something we will miss, if we only see Fat Ham live, is how this aspect of the play is both bolstered and complicated by Ijames’ stage directions. Fat Ham features an abundance of open-ended stage directions: stage directions that are either conspicuously ambiguous, or propose multiple staging options. On the one hand, these stage directions strengthen Fat Ham’s rejection of determinism. By engraining indeterminacy in the play world, they affirm that—contrary to the characters’ Shakespearean inheritance, and contrary to the determinism the white gaze would impose on them as Black people—the lives of the characters could pan out in various ways. On the other hand, open-ended stage directions qualify Fat Ham’s idealism. This is because the open-endedness that the stage directions ascribe to the play world is pointedly limited in nature. By thus hemming in indeterminacy, Fat Ham gives us to understand that, while its characters surmount some obstacles in the course of the play, the range of paths open to them as Black Americans remains constrained. After demonstrating the significance of open-ended stage directions to Fat Ham, I explore whether it is indeed unavoidable to lose this feature of the play in performance. I suggest several ways in which the indeterminacy of a play text can manifest in performance, and I argue for the importance of attempting to stage indeterminacy when it is as vital to a play’s ethos as it is to Fat Ham’s.