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Every contemporary Shakespeare production has two things going for it. Because Shakespeare is the most celebrated playwright of modern history, it’s generally taken for granted that his plays remain relevant some 400 years after his death. Yet his works are so established—so readily accepted as the standard, so thoroughly canonical—that fiddling with his folio automatically lands somewhat subversive. Are you paying respect or revising unjust history to stick it to the man? Say you make Hamlet fat, Black, and gay, as James Ijames did with his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2021 play, Fat Ham, and put Hamlet (renamed Juicy) at a family cookout in the contemporary American South instead of a Danish castle. Is transposing Shakespeare’s verse across lines of time, race, class, and sexual orientation a way of translating his ideas for a modern audience, or is it about testing his wisdoms against modern context? 

Local theater companies Portland Center Stage and Portland Playhouse are collaborating on a Fat Ham production this spring (April 19–May 17 at Portland Center Stage, $25–98). Portland Playhouse’s producing director, Charles Grant, who is directing the show, recently spoke with the Portland Mercury about effects of representation, and how the show’s all-Back cast expands its audience. He also talked about the ways Ijames’s play directly confronts historical perceptions of who Shakespeare is “for.” While most of Fat Ham’s script is original to itself, there are “moments where Juicy steps outside of his world,” Grant said, “and it’s Shakespeare’s text that lets him discover something new about himself and the world around him.”

Fat Ham was first produced as a theatrical film by Philadelphia’s Wilma Theatre as a pandemic pivot. It premiered off-Broadway in 2022 and moved to Broadway the following year, winning five Tony nominations and so much critical praise. Ijames sticks to most of Shakespeare’s framing. Juicy is studying at an online university for a career in HR. Though as with Prince Hamlet, Juicy’s dad recently died and his mom is about to marry his uncle. And a visit from his father’s vengeful ghost, telling him of the fratricide that kicked off the whole mess, animates the plot. “It is the rare takeoff that actually takes off,” reads a New York Times review, “and then flies in its own smart direction.” 

Famously, pretty much everyone dies at the end of Hamlet. It doesn’t feel like too much of a spoiler to say that fewer people die in Fat Ham. (I’ll double down and tease that some do!) Instead of cleanly praising or critiquing Shakespeare, it is in conversation with Hamlet: a play about, among many other things, Shakespeare’s complicated role in modern times. Ijames has said he wanted to “put something that I wrote right next to something that he wrote” and see if “those things would flow one into the other.” 

More things to do this week

Elsewhere...

• Portland’s best new bands of 2026, “shredding and shouting their way to community.” (Willamette Week) 
• In his latest memoir, which is a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, Justin Hocking set out to expand what social and geological exploitation can mean: “[I]t’s related to capitalist ideology—an extractive ideology and extractive forms of masculinity, which I think are ascendant and dominant in our culture, unfortunately.” (Portland Mercury)