by When he was still in the twenties and studied in acting for a master’s degree, James Ijames was recommended to take an alternative from all things that was based on Shakespeare. His tutors thought that his southern accent, the product of education in North Carolina, was not beneficial to declare the Elisabethan verse. He believed them, only a professional Shakespeare production in 10 full years in which he kicked the boards.
Now Ijames protects the old injustice, although he doesn’t see it that way. Fat Ham, his youngest drama, is based on Hamlet and shows a queer protagonist named Juicy, who is ordered by his murdered father to avenge his death. Significantly, juicy comes from a black American family in North Carolina. “What I heard over and over again,” he says, “was that my regionalism – the slowness of my southern accent – would make it difficult for me to make Shakespeare. act Avoid it for these reasons. That is a bit of what is in it. I wanted to take this thing I said about and I couldn’t access and see if I could get it up and down for myself. “
My family didn’t say: “You’re gay, go out, you’re the worst.” They just said: “Don’t do it in difficulties”
It worked in order. Fat Ham was celebrated on Broadway, won a Pulitzer price and collected five Tony Award nominations. Next month, the piece for the European premiere will come in the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Ijames, a playwright with more than 15 dramas under his belt, created the idea eight years ago when he switched back to Shakespeare.
Ijames is a relaxed presence with a calm, Donnish Air and now makes a robust suitcase for his right to Shakespeare. “I grew up in a black southern Baptist church that reads the St. James Bible every Sunday,” he says and talks about zoom. “So I grew up with the Elisabethan English. Nevertheless, I was told how I spoke, would prevent me from doing this when I saw how people spoke this language with ease and eloquence all my life. It rocked my world at a later age to see that it belonged to me.
Ijames not only hugged Shakespeare, but also played quickly and easily with this final of his tragedies. There are new names, newly arranged action lines, with most major soliloquia. “I can’t compete with it,” he explains. “I can’t be in the room to be or not to be or not to be. This existential crisis will not look like this in my characters.”
It is a bold step, not least because of an unconventional program at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival not too long ago with pieces, including references to slavery and non-binary actors that are occupied in different roles. Nataki Garrett, the artistic director of the festival, received death threats. “I remember that happened,” says Ijames, “and thinks that’s crazy.” Ijames believes that the “almost biblical quality” that some attach to his texts is not something that Shakespeare would have approved. “He tried to cause the audience’s imagination because he knew that the piece actually existed there.”
The acting for Ijames was a cumbersome way to write. In 2001 he said: “You didn’t really bring young people to Playwriting programs. So I went to the elementary school for acting.
Writing by the acting sounds more Shakespeare, I suggest. “Yes,” says Ijames. “I do not pretend to require a writer like him, but his curiosities are very similar.” Obviously: Fat Ham is warmer and comic as a Hamlet – but at its core it is a story about fathers, sons and the cycle of violence, which is triggered by the drive for revenge. Apart from the fact that FAT Hams Antiheld is fighting against violent masculinity that his father represents. “For me, it is more and more for me to ask as a writer:” What does masculinity mean? “” What does the performance of masculinity do? “
One reason why he is defined by this topic is because he shares a name with his father. “I am a ‘junior’ – so there is a kind of possession, an expectation of legacy that I lived with my whole life. As an artist, I dealt with disorders: this idea of how a man should act at a certain point in time.” He wants to investigate what is under the ideal of masculinity that young people are fed – an ideal that requires to suffocate many components of their emotional being. “It takes time,” says Ijames, “to bring this stuff back to life.”
In addition to juicy ham, there is Larry (based on Laertes) who feels a closing queer passion for Juicy. Shame and homophobia shape their flight paths. “Often,” says Ijames, “Homophobia is about not sharing yourself. I am not one of the people who say that they are homophobic because they are actually gay – but I think they are homophobic because they think that if they come too close to the body of a man, they are too close if they come too, then, then, then they are homophobic your Body could reveal it. “
I remember that I thought I should be elegant because one of my uncle was very elegant
Ijames grew up in a large family in the small town of Bessemer City. His father worked in the truck production (“he is retired – this type”), while his mother taught primary school (“she wanted us to be surrounded by art”). How was it to grow up in this household in this corner of the south queer? “I was not in a family who said: ‘Oh, you are gay, come out of here, you are the worst.’ They said: “Do not make any difficulties.” “They were such engines of the family that they changed us. I remember that I thought I should be elegant because one of my uncle was very elegant.”
What about the larger forces around him, like the Baptist Church? He tells an educational story about a late family member named Thomas Calvin, a theologian. As Ijames’ uncle, he believed that a Christian had a simple duty: to make the world a better place. “And that is my framework for Christianity.” Although Ijames has seen and experienced intensive homophobia in the churches, he still takes the moral instruction from the “aspect of the social justice of the teachings of Jesus”.
Related: Fat Ham Review Pulitzer winner Hamlet Revision meets Broadway
In view of the changes that America founded under Donald Trump, it is difficult to escape the ideas of the masculinity of the “strong”. Has it ever felt to be poisonous, more in the crises? “Well,” says Ijames, “that’s one thing that a game cannot repair.” In his own way, he adds that masculinity is hardly a single thing. “It is a constellation of things. I don’t feel safer with these strong men. So what is the strength we talk about? I don’t feel protected anymore. I don’t feel so powerful. I only feel anxious – and I am an anxious person – are anxious.” All of these alternative versions of the team are in fat ham, in darker elements. But there is also playfulness and exuberance. His characters don’t seem as malignant as Shakespeares and the end could even be described as happy. Does ijames deliberately create a state that is out of Shakespeare’s lazy condition? “I did a lot. I was excited to see what happens when we spend time with it, find out what the paradise looks like. How about if everyone doesn’t die in the end?
There is violence in fat ham and it seems to be implicitly bound by the breed and history of the United States, but ijames does not get inherited in cycles in some black communities. Instead, he goes down a different path. “I don’t write that because I don’t know how I am in it. Joy is a thing that I know in surplus. It is one of the tricks to be an actor: you understand what the audience offers fun because you have to do it with your whole body.
• FAT Ham is located from August 15th to September 13th in the Swan Theater, Stratford-Upon-Avon
