Four strong shows have opened Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 90^th season. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest opened in mid-March. And at a time when so much erasure of Black stories and glory is happening around us, it feels especially fitting and delicious that two of the season-opening shows — James Ijames’s Fat Ham and August Wilson’s Jitney — involve all-Black casts shining in transformative and celebrated plays by Black American playwrights.

Fat Ham

Fat Ham won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2022, and playfully riffs off Shakespeare’s Hamlet to open our minds to possibilities the Bard didn’t find and didn’t look for. It sets the familiar story in the too-seldom seen world of playwright James Ijames, a Black gay man from North Carolina:  a backyard family barbecue. 

It’s a setting full of familiar traps for an updated prince who would rather be queen. Juicy (Marshall W. Mabry IV) is a mama’s boy conscripted into setting up for the event in celebration of his mother’s hasty marriage to his uncle following the murder of his father. If this already feels like a mash-up (a Black queer Hamlet?  a murder-comedy?), you’re getting the drift. But Ijames’ resetting deftly employs physical comedy and agile cultural references to take us deeper.

Mabry’s performance as Juicy re-envisions muscularity to make room for questions that are often avoided for fear of looking weak, but that only the strong can face. His Juicy is funny and strong and physical, but also soft and achingly vulnerable. We see the exertion it takes to navigate a world in which he doesn’t fit the dominant idea of masculinity, where he must field pressure to enact violence while he is also expected to clean up predictable and preventable messes. His instinct is to add dashes of flair and thoughtfulness, so people feel how they want to feel. Hamlet’s dilemma of whether and how to be is reinvigorated in this embodiment.

Much of the pressure in Juicy’s world has come from his father, Pap, and Pap’s brother, Rev, both brought to furious life by Aldo Billingslea. As imagined here, these men embody a revved-up but still conventional idea of manhood, insisting on dominance enforced by violence: Pap was in prison for inflicting lethal punishment on an employee at the family’s barbecue restaurant for his bad breath. And, having arranged for his brother’s murder, Rev now governs everything in the household, including money that was meant for Juicy’s online college tuition. It seems not to have occurred to anyone, including Juicy’s formidable mother, Tedra (Lynnette R. Freeman, hilarious), that the sort of supremacy embodied by Pap and Rev could be resisted. 

Juicy, left fumbling for a response to Pap’s demand that he follow the expected pattern and violently avenge Pap’s murder, at least has the benefit of a lifetime of resistance on his side; something in him just refuses to conform to expectations that he cannot, will not, embody.  Still, he is immobilized by what his faithful-if-flighty friend Tio (a buoyant Davied Morales, this play’s Horatio) identifies as inherited trauma.  The play is punctuated by Tio’s comic, drug-induced-but-strangely-true insights, including that “Your Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail and what’s before that?” Tio knows, and we know: “Slavery.”

It’s hard to do justice to how nimbly playwright Ijames navigates this story to take us to a very different place than Shakespeare does. One needn’t know Shakespeare’s play at all to enjoy the humor and hope of the play, which will easily win over audience members who would assume that Shakespeare is not their thing, and for whom a very entertaining and funny 90 minutes is much more appealing.  But an appreciation for Shakespeare’s Hamlet will deepen audience appreciation for what Ijames is accomplishing here: The struggle of a a central Black, queer character with flawed and demonstrably unworkable expectations thrust upon him points the way to a resolution that perhaps could not be found without that outsider experience. 

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Blackness is celebrated here, and so is queerness — a clever depiction of outsiders among outsiders.  In Shakespeare’s play, the verbose character of Polonius is the father of Hamlet’s doomed love interest, Ophelia, and his antagonist, Laertes. Fat Ham replaces those characters with Rabby (Shaunyce Omar), a church lady who is certain she knows what is best for her children, Opal and Larry. 

Rabby has insisted that Opal (a determined Saran Evelyn Bakari) wear a frilly sundress to the barbecue, as antithetical to her nature as the demands that Juicy resists. Rabby doesn’t imagine the secret longings of her perfect (to her) son Larry (Christian Denzel Bufford, on point), a closed-off Marine who very secretly admires what others seek to squelch in Juicy. 

In this retelling, everyone, including enforcer Rabby, has been squelching the parts of themselves that fit least, the very parts that pound at their hearts for joyous expression. Juicy’s fumbling journey shifts the collective energy. What needs to happen isn’t more murders: It’s more freedom.

Director Elizabeth Carter sets the table well for Ijames’ wonderful, resonant party, and the intimate Thomas Theater is the perfect setting to invite audiences to savor this feast of humor and provocation and hard-won wisdom.

A universally excellent cast embodies the struggle but delivers it with deceptive ease. Fat Ham is enjoying a well-deserved moment and, although Portland Center Stage will also mount a production next year, it’s well worth a trip to Ashland before the show closes in at the end of June, not least because this is the sort of play that will bring new pleasures in various iterations. It will make you hungry for seconds.

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“Fat Ham” continues in repertory through June 27 in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Thomas Theatre in Ashland. Ticket and schedule information here.

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Jitney

The great August Wilson is known for creating works that yield new insights with each re-visioning and, with its exceptional cast and expert direction by OSF artistic director Tim Bond, OSF’s production of Jitney is a worthy contribution to that beloved tradition. 

Part of Wilson’s 10-play cycle exploring African American experience through the lens of each decade of the 20^th century, Jitney is set in the 1970s. It’s the first play of the cycle that Wilson wrote, premiering in 1982 and conceived before a cycle was even planned.

It lacks the dramatic arc of some of the more lauded and oft-performed plays in the cycle (such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences and The Piano Lesson, both of which have recently been brought to excellent life on film), but Jitney contains the essential elements that many of us, myself included, find so compelling about Wilson’s work:  his uncanny seer’s ear for dialogue that conveys truth beyond the words. Wilson’s plays afford the opportunity to listen in on how Black Americans speak to each other, which includes more than just the stories they tell directly. 

Wilson substantially revised Jitney many years after its initial production, partly in response to how beloved its earlier iteration was to people who remembered and lived its context of taxi services — jitneys — that run outside the system of licensed white-run cabs which refused to service predominantly Black areas like the Hill District in Pittsburgh, where Wilson’s cycle of plays are set. Jitney gives us the “OG Uber,” as OSF has termed it, existing just outside the systems that eject and exclude the Black men who create and power this alternative. 

This production benefits from a strong cast of actors for whom sinking into this material requires the most natural of exertions. OSF fans will especially delight to see Kevin Kenerly’s sharp Turnbow, somehow both loose yet tightly wound; Chris Butler as Booster, a man finding his footing after a long period of incarceration; and Tyrone Wilson as Fielding, fraying a bit but holding on to dignity and charm. Cast members less familiar to OSF audiences will also charm — notably James A. Williams as Becker, who holds together the group in more ways than one, and Preston Butler III as Youngblood, the youngest of the group, with his own idea of how to get ahead. 

There isn’t a weak link here — important, because the play’s construction is a bit like jazz, with no single character dominating. With impeccable timing, the characters groove off each other in various combinations, making us care about each and all. They poke fun, offer advice, struggle for small bits of primacy, enforce the norms they have agreed upon, rail against injustices big and small, offer grace and withhold it. 

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One of the themes that emerges is that the older and younger generations differ in their inclinations for how to navigate a world that can’t be trusted to keep the few promises any of them can dream to claim.  Most jitney drivers were men who had aged out of jobs in steel mills or on the railroad and, even if they were lucky enough to have a pension, they were looking to supplement their income. 

The older characters vocalize some resignation but also evince practiced resourcefulness, asserting a variety of principles that guide them. The younger folks like Youngblood and Booster have different ideas about their options for getting ahead and about what it means to stand on principle. Listening to these ideas in dialogue is one of the play’s chief delights.

Jitney doesn’t try to solve those differences. Rather, it invites us to listen in, to allow the rhythm of their talk to move us and teach us and inspire us, and to savor this example of solidarity created out of scraps. It’s a hopeful vision, particularly in times like these, and a part of Wilson’s canon that is far too essential to miss.

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August Wilson’s “Jitney’ continues in repertory through July 20 in the Angus Bowmer Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Ticket and schedule information here.

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See Darleen Ortega’s reviews of the festival’s two other season-opening shows, Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest.

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Opening later in the Ashland festival’s 90th season are Karen Zacarías’s Shane (July 31-Oct. 5), Shakespeare’s As You Like It (April 16-Oct. 25), Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (May 30-Oct. 12), the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical Into the Woods (May 31-Oct. 11), and Octavio Solis’s Quixote Nuevo (July 9-Oct. 24).