Fat Ham [Broadway – 16 May 2023]

Hamlet [Delacorte Theater – 22 July 2023]

The Public Theater committed itself to two very different reimaginings of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet this year; in fact, in addition to sharing source material, there was some overlap in the end of the run of Fat Ham and the start of the run of Hamlet in the park.

As a scholar of Shakespeare, I found Fat Ham to strike right at the heart of what Shakespeare meant to be doing with his work. In other words, the intention and ideas, reframed in our modern world, evoked the response that Shakespeare’s words were meant to evoke in their own time. James Ijames’s award winning script told stories of the common man, struggling with familial bonds, questions of identity and what on earth love is. This production shamelessly broke the fourth wall, allowed the foolish characters to also be the wisest, and brought the theatrical experience to a much wider demographic than Broadway tends to draw. The average ticket price was lower– more people could afford to see it, and more people wanted to. They knew it would be entertaining and truthful and honest– a little bit funny, a little bit dramatic. These were all of the things that Shakespeare’s work provided his audience in his time. Fat Ham was a version of Hamlet for the school of thought that when producing Shakespeare, it is most important to recreate the atmosphere and the ideas of his work, and not the literal intentions. Fat Ham‘s modern dialect and reimagined ending (why does death have to be fabulous when we could all go home with a smile in our hearts?), does exactly that.

In contrast, Hamlet in the Park (also imagined at The Public Theater), is for those who want a literal interpretation of Shakespeare’s words and want to hear every word said just as Shakespeare wrote it (whether they understand it or not). Surprisingly, this free production in Central Park was designed for the purists and the elitists much more than the Broadway transfer of Fat Ham. Despite Beowulf Boritt’s scenic design choices evoking a modern political idea, nothing about this production was updated in the slightest; the set and costumes suggested a time period, but no specific references or parallels were elucidated at any point in the show. There was definitely a thrill in seeing the production this way as well. The dramatic soliloquies, the violence, and the intensity of the production with such high caliber actors were a rare treat. For a man who said, “brevity is the soul of wit,” I am disappointed to say that I watched the audience start to trickle out when they decided they had had enough. I was riveted and transfixed in my seat, and I found it distracting and difficult to swallow that others were not enjoying the clarity of this window into some of the Shakespearean topics that were not fully touched by Fat Ham— topics of madness and lack of empathy and severe consequences that utterly undo characters.

Both shows did an excellent job peddling stories of divided loyalties, mistrust in others, discomfort in our own skin, different ways of coping with grief and loss, talking directly to the audience as a sounding board for talking to oneself, and making theatre accessible– for Fat Ham in recontextualization, for Hamlet in affordability. It was a pleasure to be able to look at these two productions side by side and enjoy the healthy discourse on how we continue to produce classics as the world shifts. What do we preserve? The intended atmosphere? The literal words? Is this supposed to reflect what is still relevant in our time, or what was relevant in the time it was written? As a theatre practitioner, it is heartening to see that the answer is still that we should be doing both– lots and lots of both.