Arts Alive! podcast: Juicy and Rabby from ‘Fat Ham’

Our guests today on Arts Alive! are members of the exemplary cast of American Stage’s production of Fat Ham, by James Ijames.

The playwright takes the bones of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and drapes over them a fresh body – Fat Ham is the story of a dysfunctional family, with a conflicted young man named Juicy at its center, a protagonist who’s trying to make sense of his father’s violent murder in prison.

Set in the present day, it takes place during a North Carolina backyard barbecue as Juicy, whose widowed mother has just married her husband’s scheming brother, is grappling with issues of identity and sexuality, belief and disbelief, and the knowledge – imparted to him by dead Daddy’s ghost – that there was more to said murder than everyone else believes.

In the studio today are Deimoni Brewington, who plays Juicy (he’s onstage for virtually all of the nearly two-hour play) and Andresia Moseley, whose character is Juicy’s Aunt Rabby – her daughter Opal is going through life crises of her own.

While Brewington, making his American Stage debut, lives in the Washington, D.C. area, Moseley is a longtime performer on professional Tampa Bay stages.

We talk about the Pulitzer Prize-winning play’s themes, its roiling sense of humor, its relationship to Hamlet and lots more.

Click on the arrow to listen to the (pretty darn funny) conversation.