Daddy Issues in a Pair of Plays
Wherever there’s a sensitive young man, afraid of life, inexplicably angry, searching restlessly for an audience, you can be fairly sure that a story about his father is about to pour forth. That trope is as true in literature as in life: think of Telemachus, of Oedipus, of Hamlet, poor guys driven to distraction, or long-distance travel, or murder by the spectre of Dad. Patrimonial dysfunction—the kind of deep-rooted stuff that gets grown men singing along to “Cat’s in the Cradle” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone”—is a classic theme, explored and stylishly transposed in a pair of recent plays featuring queer, questioning, father-haunted protagonists.
Juicy (Marcel Spears), the beguiling centrifuge of “Fat Ham,” by James Ijames, and Édouard Louis, the autobiographical character in the one-man show “Who Killed My Father,” adapted by Louis from his book-length essay, are in many ways an unlikely pair. Juicy is Black and Édouard is white; Édouard is French and Juicy is American. But they’re both working class and alienated, and both try to find, and to rescue, their gentler takes on masculinity amid the admonishments of macho-acting father figures.
“Fat Ham,” which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, is a sometimes faithful, sometimes dizzyingly disruptive riff on “Hamlet,” with Juicy as that excruciatingly ambivalent mourner, quick of wit but slow to act. He wears black overalls, a black mesh tank, black sneakers, and a tasteful stroke of black eyeliner: a kind of chic, contemporary funeral costume that would fit right in on the East Village streets near the Public Theatre, where this production is running, under the direction of Saheem Ali. But Juicy’s no New Yorker—he’s from North Carolina, which, as Ijames writes in an introductory note in his script, exists “in a kind of liminal space between the past and the present with an aspirational relationship to the future.” (Juicy could also live in “Virginia, or Maryland or Tennessee,” Ijames says. “It is not Mississippi, or Alabama or Florida. That’s a different thing all together.”) The way that Spears plays Juicy is similarly liminal: he’s smart but a victim of brain fog, funny but ponderous, soulful but stuck.
Juicy’s father, Pap (Billy Eugene Jones), was killed in prison, where he was doing a bid for an absurd crime: he killed somebody because the man’s breath smelled bad. “Now . . . to be fair,” Juicy says, in one of his frequent moments of direct address to the audience, “Boogie’s breath smell like his insides was decomposing.” That kind of cartoonish reason for violence works well as a twisted joke, but it’s also the crux of Juicy’s problems with his family and with the world. His father calls him “soft” as a pejorative—homophobic danger thrums under the surface of Juicy’s interactions with other men—but, in truth, soft is the texture that this big-boned kid wants for his life. What Pap sees as an evil, Juicy understands as an unmitigated good.
Pap visits Juicy, appearing as a ghost whose white clothes emit smoke in an extravagant display of otherworldliness, and demands vengeance: the man who shanked him in prison was deputized by Pap’s brother, Rev (also played by Jones). Both men were expert barbecuers; now Pap wants Juicy to flay his uncle Rev like a hog. But Juicy’s not interested in barbecue or in slaughter, or in revenge. Rev is a contemptible sort: after he had his brother killed, he immediately married Juicy’s mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford). And he’s full of false religiosity. A prayer he issues at the postnuptial back-yard barbecue that serves as the play’s setting is one of many humorous bits engineered by Ijames and executed by Ali.
Juicy, as we learn, can be cruel in his own way, and his tendency is to “ponder” rather than to participate, but it’s also obvious that he aspires to love instead of war. Spears is a heart-first performer, who makes Juicy’s moments of anguish rhyme with his shady asides, pointing out how both attitudes flow from a deep deposit of frustrated affection for the sensual world, and a hope for a life of his own making.
One of Ijames’s considerable achievements in “Fat Ham” is to coax out the Oedipal underpinnings in the character of Hamlet: despite Juicy’s indecisiveness and his insistence that he misses his father, it’s clear that, on some level, he is also relieved to have the old man gone. Pap says that father and son should be “one beating heart,” but Juicy and Tedra are a more natural pair. They’ve got tension over Rev, but the ease between them always shines through. She playfully chases him around the back yard, calling him “thicc” and grabbing at his backside. “Baby, people paying good money for an ass like that,” she crows. When she insists on doing karaoke at the barbecue, it’s Juicy who fetches the machine and—even while pleading, “Momma, no”—furtively accompanies her rendition of “100% Pure Love.”
Prickly and soft in equal measure, Juicy reminds me of the late poet Essex Hemphill, a master of frank desire whose smart, melancholy, life-hungry speakers toss off lines like these:
With a fresh and vital force, Ijames and Juicy make the Hamlet saga more comedy than tragedy, taking a tortured story of father influence and turning it into a kind of party. They might, together, sing a couplet from a different Hemphill poem:
Like Juicy, Édouard Louis, in “Who Killed My Father” (at St. Ann’s Warehouse, directed by Thomas Ostermeier), is caught up in memories, trying to resolve their contradictions before he can move forward into the future. The title of the play isn’t missing a question mark: Louis’s intention, achieved by way of a long, searching monologue, is to tell you, not to ask, who’s done his father in. It’s a memoiristic piece with one large fictional element—Louis’s real father is still alive, a fact that the play never discloses. But, as Louis makes clear in his unwinding of their lives together, the twin disappointments of politics and prejudice have made his father the object of a kind of social death, well before the process of bodily decomposition begins.
The show opens on Édouard, alone at a cluttered desk, wearing a simple hoodie and jeans, peering into a laptop. Behind him is a stage-encompassing screen, on which moody photos and videos appear: snatches of a rainy drive on a highway; Édouard on a beach, his thin body reflected on a slick floor of sand, surrounded by clouds of foam from washed-up waves. He speaks in French, and a translation appears on the screen. Early on, he offers the social theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s dictum that racism is “vulnerability to premature death.” The bigotry here, though, is homophobia. Édouard wanted a DVD of “Titanic” as a childhood gift, and his father, he says, begged him to want something more boyish. Both his parents directed slurs at him, and the threat of violence was part of the ambience of their home, but he still dressed up as his favorite pop chanteuses and danced. Édouard lip-synchs some of these numbers for us, making “Who Killed My Father,” at least in part, the saddest drag show ever put on.
The piece works slowly, and culminates in a condemnation of French politicians, such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron, whose austerity measures helped to break Édouard’s father’s body as well as his spirit. It’s a good reminder that it’s not only your father but your fatherland—your patria—that can foreclose your future. Just days after I saw these shows, nineteen children and two teachers in Texas were killed in a mass shooting, an occurrence now so common in America that it feels like an unwanted family heirloom, an inheritance of paternal debt. The questions are the same: How can we stop these recurring nightmares? How can we move on? To find answers means more truth, less filial piety, and God knows how much more time. ♦
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