Video: Director Sideeq Heard on FAT HAM at Geffen Playhouse

Watch as Director Sideeq Heard shares what he hopes audiences will understand about themselves and others after seeing Fat Ham at Geffen Playhouse.

"I vividly remember getting the script for Fat Ham and being captivated from the first page. It stopped me in my tracks because it felt so familiar; it reminded me of my friends, my brothers, and cousins. I thought, 'Oh my gosh, this is amazing.'" said Heard about directing the production.

Geffen Playhouse is presenting the West Coast premiere of the Broadway production of five-time Tony Award nominee and 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner Fat Ham, written by James Ijames. The Geffen Playhouse West Coast premiere of Saheem Ali’s Broadway production of Fat Ham is directed by Sideeq Heard, who also served as associate director for the Broadway production.

The cast includes Nikki Crawford (The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, Stormy Weather) as Tedra; Chris Herbie Holland (White Noise, The Box) as Tio; Billy Eugene Jones (Purlie Victorious, A Soldier’s Play) as Rev/Pap; Adrianna Mitchell (Snowfall, What to Send Up When It Goes Down) as Opal; Marcel Spears (The Neighborhood, The Mayor) as Juicy; Benja Kay Thomas (Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, Bootycandy) as Rabby; and Matthew Elijah Webb (YELL: a “documentary” of my time here, A Raisin in the Sun) as Larry.

Meet Juicy, a young, queer Black man with a Shakespearean-sized dilemma. When the ghost of his dead father shows up at his family’s BBQ wedding reception demanding his murder be avenged, does the poetic and sensitive Juicy have it in him to do the deed, or will he “to thine own self be true?” See what the New York Times calls “a hilarious yet profound tragedy smothered in comedy,” in this Pulitzer Prize–winning take on Hamlet, direct from Broadway to L.A.

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