She wears a short black dress; one black high-heel is on (dangling from her foot) and the other lies on the floor just a few feet away from the audience. Are we meant to consume her? Is this some kind of funeral viewing? She stirs. Is she coming back from the dead or just waking from a bad dream? I feel excited and a little scared.

In Fat Ham, playwright James Ijames and his characters dream bigger than Shakespeare, bigger than the new play’s contemporary backyard barbecue setting and consequent societal expectations in order to introduce to us a new way of thinking and being for the future of theater.

The following reflections are from three women close to the playwright, all of whom met Stout in different stages of life (elementary childhood, college, etc.). Here, they offer reflections on the work in context with the woman who wrote it.

Inside [Julia] Izumi’s magic act, her tricks become the place of cultural invention. Through farce, Izumi teaches audiences new ways to grieve, new ways to resist categorization, and the oversimplification of a personal origin story.

What am I scared of? Before we make theater, we sit in a room together. I’m scared of the generation that is coming to the fore in the arts.

In May 2020, I got a cold email from an Off-Broadway theater. It was an offer to assistant direct a new play that I was really excited about. The play was scheduled to go up in October 2020 — which, at the time, was when the optimists among us expected things in the theater industry to get better. I jumped on board, participating in a flurry of conceptual discussions and design meetings. As hard as the summer of 2020 was, at least I had something to look forward to.

I used to love introducing myself to people. I loved it because they inevitably asked what I did, and I gleefully got to tell them that I worked in theater.

"Can you believe I just started the outlet and then started the training program that same year? I can't believe I had the audacity."

I have also always been a very attentive learner. So if an editor made a change, I thought about why that change was made, and I learned from my mistakes.

"My sense was always that newspapers were the training ground and the ladder for me. I always thought I would spend my entire career in newspapers."