The fact that this play won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama—despite having never been staged—tells you just about all you need to know about the inherent energy of this very funny, smart, and provocative gloss on Hamlet, which is now on Broadway in front of live (and rightly enthusiastic) audiences. Featuring an all-Black cast, and set during a family barbecue in the present-day American South, Fat Ham is not another by-the-numbers updating of the melancholic young prince’s bloody woes. Instead, the playwright James Ijames uses Shakespeare’s tragedy as a jumping-off point to create a wonderfully inventive and fast-paced domestic comedy that is not only laugh-out-loud funny but a deft dramatization of how sexuality, identity, violence, and masculinity play out in Black families. —Michael Hainey