'Prince F****t' Off-Broadway review — thought-provoking examination of queerness within the Royal Family
Read our review of Prince Faggot off Broadway, a world-premiere play written by Jordan Tannahill and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury at Playwrights Horizons.
Within the same 24-hour time frame as this critic went to a press night for Jordan Tannahill’s naughtily titled Prince Faggot, dozens of articles were published about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the couple who are now technically castoffs of the Royal Family having since defected from their duties in 2020. Two hours prior to opening my Word document, photos of Prince George, son of William and Kate, were doing the rounds in celebration of Father’s Day. Even if the royals are not directly on your radar, the idle hum of their influence is always felt in the background of modern life.
This essential unknowability of the Windsor Family — that they can be flesh and blood, yet carry with them such immense power (even as their rule recedes) — has always been a rich opportunity for artists and playwrights, from Peter Morgan to Mike Bartlett, to imagine the interiors of the castle and the hallways of the Royals’ minds. Tannahill, the Canadian writer and theatremaker, has taken this very lack of access as his primary subject, though under the guise of speculatively exploring the life of Prince George, whose willowy poses and fey limp wristing ignited internet discourse several years ago (and has lightly persisted).
Prince Faggot at times feels like Tannahill has grafted the conventions of the romantic comedy/drama onto the imagined life of George: boy (John McCrea) comes out to parents (Rachel Crowl and K. Todd Freeman), boy brings boy (Mihir Kumar) home to meet the parents, boy and boy are from very different worlds, boys fall out of love, boys float in and out of each other’s lives. There are shades of Notting Hill, The American President, and The Prince & Me speckled throughout, dotted with conversations about difference, power, the bloody legacy of the British Empire, BDSM, and the kinds of queerness that are permitted, if at all, in the halls of power.
These are not uninteresting conversations, which are told in surprisingly unexceptional ways — a kind of indication of this near future’s capacity to allow queerness to signify social cache versus political threat. In these scenes of domestic strife, Tannahill is always ready to remind the audience that this is not like any other family, and George is not like any other queer person. The cast, abetted by the terrific theatre stalwart David Greenspan and an underused N'yomi Allure Stewart, are also quick to remind spectators, through intermittent direct addresses, that these people are so out of reach and yet so embedded within a cultural imagination that it’s difficult not to reflect on how one sees their own relationship to identity and performance.
Prince Faggot’s ambitions thus feel somewhat paradoxical: humanize and make real a figure who can ultimately only exist as a cultural imaginary, while also interrogate the allure of identification and desire to relate with/to such quasi-mythological figures, requiring a kind of academic removal. A whiff of Carol and experimental Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There director Todd Haynes can be smelt from the various acknowledgments of how these characters’ lives are mediated – by the press, by the mythology – for the audience and for one another.
McCrea rises to the task of making Prince George a queer in no man’s land, inheriting centuries of divinely anointed power while being constrained by it, and yet unable to be “truly” queer as in “other”. McCrea is best not when he is rolling around and contorting his body during emotional fallout, but when he makes himself small, pathetic, and without ground to stand on. If part of the question of the play has to do with what queerness means within houses of immense control — be it geopolitical, cultural, or economic — and whether there is a worthwhile distinction between that and “mere” homosexuality, McCrea articulates more clearly these quandaries through his body, as he is trapped between protocol and limited freedom.
But Prince Faggot tends to raise a lot of the same questions, particularly about race, power, and imperial legacy, repetitious without necessarily finding novel ways inside the question or answer. And as solid as the writing is, one wishes that some of it were more muscular and playful, the language only really reaching ecstatic heights during a terrific acid trip scene. Kumar appears to struggle with giving more of an emotional dimension to these rhetorical games, rendering Dev and George’s on-again, off-again dynamic cooler when it should be boiling with pent up feeling, thus betraying some of the more schematic aspects of the work. And as conversations of their differences reach a fever pitch, Kumar tends to deliver the same kinds of notes, emphatic without texture or dynamism.
Downtown theatre icon Greenspan nearly runs away with a play that’s strangely not weird enough by imbuing the show with a deliciously contradictory archness and sincerity. Greenspan, as the butler Farmer and PR manager Jaqueline, assumes a vantage point of both immediate intimacy with the Royal Family, particularly as confidant to gradually unstable George, and image manufacturing and myth making. He is covert in certain scenes as Farmer and fiery as Jacqueline, sporting a severe blonde bob and twirling on her heel when preparing Dev for the upcoming onslaught of attention. Greenspan never “disappears” into his characters but he nevertheless grants them a fullness and a rich inner life. Hardly the most novel descriptor for a performer with the crowning legacy Greenspan has, but his chameleonic capabilities gel with Prince Faggot’s primary occupations: if the Royals are nothing but people who have been, save for divine designation, granted this rule, Prince Faggot shows that the structures of power could collapse and be remade in queer people's own image.
Prince Faggot summary
In a work of queer fabulation, as one character says at the beginning of the show, Prince Faggot imagines Prince George or Sussex as queer, bringing home a boy from university, and the problems that arise from being abject in a family with centuries of tradition, yet saddled with immense wealth and power — unlike any other queer person in the world. The show is a co-production of Playwrights Horizons and Soho Rep.
What to expect at Prince Faggot
Prince Faggot’s cast begins by sitting on the raised, translucently checkered stage and reminiscing about their childhoods and the queerness of their youth, photos of their younger selves projected upon a rectangular monolith. David Zinn’s scenic design has two ornate crystal chandeliers, white chairs with curling arm rests, and a table top that lowers from the ceiling. There’s a slick but straightforward mix of the modern and classical, all presented in a spareness. Lee Kinney’s excellent score blares in between scenes to flesh out the majesty. And Isabella Byrd’s lighting easily toggles between the moments of imperial banality and the more heightened, surreal emotional and sexual spirals. Prince Faggot features explicit sexuality, but weaves it into the show’s as part of meditations on identity, ego, and power.
What audiences are saying about Prince Faggot
At the time of writing, Prince Faggot had a 72% audience approval rating on Show-Score.
- Show-Score user aka says, “The cast is excellent, though Greenspan knows how to steal a show. this is not for everybody --- some may find it a bit unfocused or too spicy -- but if you are looking for something ballsy, this is your ticket.”
- Show-Score user SelinaS says, “it's not perfect but nothing that tackles all of these ideas ever is. It has to labor to explain its own existence which is unfortunate but also understandable given the world we live in. However this is Theater, Capital T. It takes advantage of all the things you can only really accomplish in the theater format. Well acted across the board, moving, funny, sad. Go go go.”
- Show-Score user GreatAvi says, “What an unexpected rarity: a thought provoking, clever, original, and well-directed play that's also great theater, the kind of show you want to go discuss over a drink right after.”
Read more audience reviews of Prince Faggot on Show-Score.
Who should see Prince Faggot
- Those familiar with Jordan Tannahill’s work, from The Listeners to his treatise Theater of the Unimpressed, will be interested to see how he has continued to evolve his dramatic explorations of queerness, power, and artifice.
- Audiences who are interested in the Royal Family will find this thought experiment engaging and provocative.
- Ticket buyers who have ever come across a picture of a famous person on the internet and wondered what their life must be like will need to see this.
Learn more about Prince Faggot
Though Prince Faggot has a straightforwardness to its imagined life of Prince George that occasionally results in a repetition of (very compelling) ideas and begs for a bit more weirdness, Tannahill nonetheless vividly interrogates the paradox of identity and identification. He tantalizingly suggests that these titles — King, Queen, Butler, Prince — only have meaning because of tradition. These words could be as powerful or powerless as the subjects beneath them allow them to be. They are informed by the social, historical, and political landscape around them, but perhaps that very context can be modified, rewritten, or subverted meaningfully. In Prince Faggot, George is both a broken beating heart and a thought experiment, an idea of social and political otherness resting as close to ultimate power as you can imagine. The very structures of history, politics, and desire begin to find themselves destabilized, and it is in this tug of war between tradition and subversion that George finds himself. Prince Faggot asks if anything would change, if life would be better, if power itself accommodated the historically disenfranchised. As cultural representation of LGBTQ people has changed, perhaps queerness's end game in the Establishment lands with nothing more than a stalemate.
Photo credit: Prince Faggot off Broadway. (Photos by Marc J. Franklin)
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