How Winning the Pulitzer Has Made James Ijames Bolder

variety.com:

Gordon Cox Theater EditorThe playwright James Ijames is no stranger to audacious choices. His adaptation of “Hamlet,” “Fat Ham,” sets the story at a backyard barbecue thrown by a Black family in the South — and reimagines the tragedy as a comedy.Now that “Fat Ham” has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, expect him to get even bolder.Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:“I feel like I want to take more risks now,” Ijames said on Stagecraft, Variety‘s theater podcast. “I want to be more adventurous.

It’s made me braver.”He added, “I also feel like [winning the Pulitzer] pulls me into a community of people that I have admired for a really long time.

That’s amazing, to look at that list of people I’ve read, and studied, and acted in their work, over my career. To have the opportunity to be in the same category with them is really lovely.” “Fat Ham” is the one of three Shakespeare plays Ijames wants to rethink with a contemporary, queer, Black lens.

He’s now at work on a version of “Othello” that’s just as surprising as his “Hamlet.”“It’s an Othello character who’s a computer scientist who’s grappling with racism inside of artificial intelligence, and the Iago character is an AI,” he explained. “It starts to mess with his own conception of who he is and what he believes.