Fat Ham is modeled after William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. Ijames relies on the primary conflict in which Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is tasked by his late father’s ghost with avenging his murder. The ghost, Hamlet Senior, tells Hamlet how his brother, Claudius, poured poison into his ear while he was asleep. Claudius’s motive was to usurp his brother’s crown, becoming King of Denmark by marrying his brother’s wife, Gertrude.

Fat Ham features a parallel circumstance: Juicy, a 20-year-old Black man living in the American South, is visited by the ghost of his late father. Pap, Juicy’s father, describes how his brother Rev, a minister, had him killed in prison by a fellow prisoner. Rev goes on to marry Pap’s widow, Tedra, and aspires to take over the family business—a barbecue restaurant.

On its surface, the Fat Ham scenario is a comical update of Hamlet. However, the story is fraught with tension, asking important questions about identity, purpose, and personal responsibility to family, community, and society. Ijames adapts the source play to explore contemporary issues of race and sexual identity, raising questions of what it means to be an “other” in a world that is still reluctant, in many ways, to embrace those who do not fit traditional molds of gender and sexual identity.