I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this play, which imagines a grownup Prince George of England (currently 11 years old) as an out gay man. I was put off by the offensive title, and by what it seems to promise — a campy exercise in pointless provocation.
Now I feel lucky to have gotten in. (The run, at Playwrights Horizons in a co-production with SoHo Rep, is sold out except for Sunday July 20, when tickets are 99 cents but can’t be booked in advance. Maybe they’ll extend it again?)
“Prince Faggot,” wonderfully acted and artfully staged, turns out to be surprisingly earnest, thoughtful, even respectful. I don’t mean to mislead (or disappoint) anyone: The play, written by Jordan Tannahill and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, has its hilarious campy moments, and is undeniably meant to shock – by the title and the premise, and by a couple of sex scenes so graphic that theatergoers are required to lock up their smartphones in a Yondr pouch. But the storytelling feels honest – and even, at times, profound.
When we first see the adult George (John McCrea), it is 2032, he is 18 years old, and he is arguing with his parents William (K. Todd Freeman) and Kate (Rachel Crowl) in Kensington Palace, because they seem reluctant to meet Dev (Mihir Kumar), the slightly older Oxford schoolmate George has been dating for several months.
There is a hint of royal reserve, a concern with appearances, (“we don’t hold hands, Daddy, we don’t kiss,” George reassures William)
But they are also modern parents (“We love you, with all of our heart, and we’re thrilled that you’re— you know, that you’re seeing someone who makes you happy,” Kate says), and George gets them to agree to have him over for a weekend at Anmer Hall, a royal country house.
“My god,” Dev says to himself, seated at the royal dinner table in the next scene. “ I’m in a fucking Keira Knightly movie.” The Royals are gracious, Dev holds his own, but there are hints of trouble from the start. Among those greeting Dev is “our lovely communications secretary Jaqueline” who has insisted on an emergency meeting. Out comes David Greenspan in fabulous white wig and all-white couture (this is one of the hilarious campy moments; Greenspan also plays the gay royal butler, and one of the old kings in a dream sequence of past monarchs — all to the hilt.)
Jaqueline is all charm with Dev until she gets down to business, having quite thoroughly (invasively) researched Dev — his social media posts, published Art History papers, family, politics. Implicit also is his heritage, which Dev picks up on: “You know what your parents are thinking? Shit, we’ve got another Megan…The press is going to chew me up ten times worse than Diana or Megan, and meanwhile you’ll just move onto the next thing, and onto the next thing…” Things do not go smoothly.
The basic plot here is not much different from the royal romances that are a streaming staple, particularly the gay royal romances, such as “The Young Royals,” a Swedish TV series on Netflix, and “Red, White & Royal Blue” on Prime Video (directed and co-written by Tony-winning playwright Matthew Lopez.) It feeds some of the same widespread obsession with royalty. If Dev and George have intractably different worldviews, so in The Young Royals do Prince Wilhelm and his love interest, Simon (who is not just a scholarship student, but an avowed socialist.) The arguments about the monarchy felt familiar to me, and I wasn’t especially impressed with the unsubtle effort to connect the power dynamics in their sexual relationship (which involves domination and bondage) to the history of monarchy and imperialism.
What most distinguishes “Prince Faggot” is the way the play is framed by the stories, and attitudes, of the six cast members, all of whom are queer. All but one of the monologues that they tell about themselves, Tannahil says in a note, are fictional, written by the playwright. But they seem to closely track the stories of people who have had to fight to escape treatment as the Other. Before the plot kicks in, there is a disarming prologue where each actor introduces themselves by showing their baby picture. Mihir Kumar’s is the first: When he saw it recently, “I just burst out laughing because it was so overwhelmingly obvious:even at the age of four, I was a fairy.” The next photograph is of Prince George at four – which prompts perhaps the same debate theatergoers would likely have, about the ethics of making up a speculative story about an actual child.
Kumar says: there’s a “heterosexual default” imposed on all children, and as long as that’s the case “it is an act of compassion to give shelter to this effete little prince under the broad umbrella of queerness.”
Freeman says: Things have gotten so hot in this country— You start talking about queer childhood, they’re gonna brand you a groomer…
Kumar: That’s exactly my point, we can’t even have a nuanced conversation about these things
Freeman: And I’m saying leave this real child out of all that shit.
David Greenspan: Frankly, I think we’ve been doing a terrible job with the grooming. I mean look how many straights there are still.
Throughout the rest of the play, the performers sometimes shed their characters to offer some exposition about the plot. But often their monologues are digressions about their own concerns. After a scene in which Dev gives George a lion pin, Rachel Crowl says as cast member that she reacted emotionally to the affection between the two men, because as a trans girl she was denied the experience of “having just a normal first kiss, first crush, first romance”
After a scene in which Kate and William debate what to do about George, who has fallen into addiction, Freeman appears as the cast member to angrily recall how when he played a king in university the director/teacher asked him ”to take some of the gangster swagger out of it” — meaning, be less Black.
The only performer telling their own actual story, N’yomi Allure Stewart, explains she’s a princess for real – awarded “Princess of the Pier” in a vogue ball.
Shayok Misha Chowdhury directs “Prince Faggot” with a generous spirit and a painterly eye, each actor and each designer getting a chance to shine – the scenes alternating from sumptuous to sensuous to straightforward. Chowdhury is best known as the playwright of “Public Obscenities,” another play far more embraceable than its title might suggest.
Prince Faggot
Soho Rep at Playwrights Horizons through August 3
Running time: Two hours with no intermission
Tickets: Sold out but 99 cents on Sunday July 20
Written by Jordan Tannahill
Directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury
Scenic design by David Zinn, costume design by Montana Levi Blanco, lighting design by Isabella Byrd, sound design and original music by Lee Kinney, wig and hair design by Cookie Jordan, intimacy coordinary UnkleDave’s Fight-house dramaturg Sarah Lunnie, dialect coach Deborah Hecht
Cast:Mihir Kumar as performer 1/Dev, K. Todd Freeman as performer 2/William, Prince of Wales, Rachel Crowl as performer 3/Catherine, Princess of Wales, N’yomi Allure Stewart as performer 4/Princess Charlotte, George’s sister, David Greenspan as performer 5/the royal butler Andrew and the royal communications director Jaqueline, John McCrea as performer 6/Prince George
