Prince Faggot

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In the prologue to Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot, an audacious and form-defying theatrical inquiry, six performers—each playing versions of themselves—step onto the stage not merely as actors but as interlocutors, debaters, and witnesses to their own creative act. What unfolds is not an opening scene so much as a meta-theatrical crucible: a group of queer artists collectively wrestling with the ethical dimensions of the story they are about to tell—a story of “queer prognostication,” of imagining queer futures, of queerness not as a phase deferred but as a presence, innate and inalienable from childhood.

One performer, with plaintive conviction, asserts: “I was not a queer man-in-waiting. I was a queer child.” In this simple yet radical declaration lies the beating heart of the production’s argument: that queer identity is not an adult imposition retroactively read onto childhood, but rather something experienced from the beginning, even if language or safety forbade its expression. Counterpointing this, another actor recalls with bemused irony the heteronormative assumptions placed on him as a toddler: “My grandfather used to ask me when I was three and four if I had a girlfriend yet.” That such presumption provokes no cultural discomfort—while imagining queer futures still feels, to some, like a transgression—forms the play’s central tension.

This moral friction is crystallized in a moment of self-interrogation: “Does your protectiveness extend to showing this photograph (a photo of a four-year-old Prince George) to a theatre of 128 strangers?” It’s a cutting, almost prosecutorial question that pierces the thin veil between storytelling and exposure, one that the play neither dodges nor definitively resolves. Instead, it chooses to dwell on that ambiguity, pressing forward with a narrative that leaps from the early 2030s to 2045 with a kind of prophetic daring.

Prince Faggot, for all its unresolved provocations, does not descend into didacticism. Rather, it elevates its inquiry through an exquisitely paradoxical structure—at once sensational and solemn, intimate and spectacular. Tannahill wraps his futuristic vision in a shimmering cloak of genre-bending theatricality, yet never loses touch with the vulnerable, beating core of his story: a deeply moving meditation on kinship, chosen and inherited, and on the ineffable entanglement of memory, desire and identity. In doing so, the work achieves something rare in contemporary theatre—a dramaturgical leap into the speculative that remains grounded in emotional precision.

The result is a unique creation—brave, morally complex, and theatrically unclassifiable—that refuses to comfort or condemn, choosing instead to question, to expose, and above all, to feel.

In a sharply observed and emotionally layered turn, Prince Faggot brings a fresh perspective to the classic “meet the parents” trope—with a royal twist. John McCrea’s George, the openly gay Prince of England, brings his boyfriend Dev (an excellent Mihir Kumar) home to meet his parents: the seemingly progressive Prince William (K. Todd Freeman, masterfully restrained) and Princess Kate (a poised and quietly complex Rachel Crowl). At first glance, the royal welcome is warm, even congenial. But beneath the polished surface lies a prickly nest of social expectation, national identity, and unacknowledged privilege.

Kumar’s Dev is our emotional anchor—a man thrust into the blinding glare of media attention simply for loving someone the world isn’t quite ready to accept without caveats. As the press closes in with a voyeuristic appetite, Dev finds himself isolated in a palace that should feel safe. Yet the real obstacle isn’t the public; it’s George himself. McCrea plays the Prince with a boyish charm that curdles into fragility whenever his own privilege is questioned. George cannot comprehend the historical and racial chasm that separates him from Dev, nor the imperial weight his future crown carries. When Dev gently but pointedly raises the specter of empire and colonialism, George’s blinkered optimism, delivered with almost painful sincerity, becomes the most devastating critique of all.

What transforms this speculative glimpse into Britain’s royal future from mere thought experiment into something profoundly human is its unexpectedly tender portrayal of William and Kate. These aren’t just symbolic figures navigating a shifting monarchy—they’re parents, grappling with heartbreak and hope. Rachel Crowl gives Kate a composed, steely grace, but it’s K. Todd Freeman who delivers the evening’s most searing performance. His William is not simply a royal heir, but a father staring down the unbearable reality of his son’s unraveling. Freeman traces William’s journey with aching precision, his stoic facade crumbling as he fights—desperately, and with palpable sorrow—to reclaim George from the brink of addiction.

And then, in a quietly radical moment, the production breaks its own illusion. Freeman steps out of William’s royal bearing and speaks directly to the audience—not as monarch, but as a Black actor inhabiting the role of one. It’s a jolt, purposeful and stirring. In that brief rupture, the play asserts its deeper ambition: not just to imagine a different future, but to challenge who we allow to embody it. It’s a moment that reframes the entire evening, revealing the power of representation not as ornament, but as necessity.

Under the keen direction of Shayok Misha Chowdhury—himself a vital voice in the landscape of South Asian queer theater, most vibrantly with Public Obscenities—Prince Faggot thrives on a rare balance of ensemble cohesion and striking individual distinction. Chowdhury crafts a staging in which collective storytelling never mutes personal expression; instead, each of the six performers gleams with purpose and flair, their autonomy unmistakable and essential to the production’s pulse.

David Greenspan is a comedic revelation, doubling as the archly mannered gay butler Farmer and the ferocious, impeccably coiffed communications director Jacqueline. With razor-sharp timing and flamboyant precision, he threads the play with its richest comedic textures, yet easily the most beautiful moment in the play is of Farmer and George together alone; George is curled up next to the servant, no, his friend, with his head resting on Farmer’s shoulder. This is George’s true solace. Meanwhile, Crowl and N’yomi Allure Stewart square off in a blistering mother-daughter standoff, as Princess Kate and Princess Charlotte, respectively. Their scenes crackle with intensity, but what makes them resonate even deeper is the space the play gives to their own trans identities—not as token, but as texture, as lineage, as inheritance. Chowdhury directs these moments with care and intention, allowing gender, power, and performance to intersect in ways that feel both thrillingly theatrical and emotionally grounded.

Isabella Byrd’s lighting design is nothing short of a masterstroke, imbuing the stage with a chiaroscuro elegance that evokes the brooding grandeur of a Caravaggio canvas. Actors emerge from and recede into the upstage shadows as if brushed into existence by a divine, if mischievous, hand. The interplay of light and darkness renders each tableau not merely visible, but viscerally alive—at once erotic and breathtakingly sublime. The production moves with relentless, almost feverish momentum, as scene after scene is conjured and collapsed within the ingenious confines of David Zinn’s protean set. Zinn has imagined a space that is part gilded palace, part decadent nightclub—a dreamlike collision of monarchy and mania, as though Versailles had been sublet by Studio 54. Every transition is punctuated with thudding inevitability by Lee Kinney’s sound design, a relentless pulse of synthetic euphoria that seems both ironic and sincere in its homage to the saccharine excesses of gay club culture. It is music that assaults, in the best possible way.

Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes are a wickedly playful riff on the buttoned-up bespoke world of Savile Row, refracted through a prism of queer maximalism. What might have been a somber parade of Windsor-worthy tailoring is instead turned on its ear—camp, cruel, and utterly captivating. The high-water mark comes in a delirious acid-trip sequence, in which a phantasmagoria of royal ancestors parades by in grotesque regalia, culminating in a moment of such audacious visual poetry that it demands to be witnessed rather than described: Queen Anne, solemn and spectral, anoints the chosen successor with—yes—a leather puppy mask.

From its very first moments, Prince Faggot announces itself not merely as a piece of performance, but as a volatile site of interrogation—an unflinching dramaturgical inquiry into the boundaries of taste, authorship, and queer representation. In an opening exchange of conspicuous self-awareness, Tannahill dares to question the prurient potential of his own artistic impulses, preemptively folding critique into creation. This recursive sensibility becomes a structural hallmark of the piece, which repeatedly interrupts its most arresting tableaux—particularly those laced with erotic charge—with meta-theatrical pivots that reframe the action and interrogate its very purpose. It is a work that consumes its own tail, constantly revising the lens through which we understand what we have just seen.

Nowhere is this more evident than in a scene of astonishing explicitness: George and Dev engage in a sexual encounter so viscerally depicted that it ranks among the most graphically staged moments in recent New York theater. The encounter is undeniably shocking, its sheer intimacy daring audiences to confront their own voyeurism. One might be tempted to cry “gratuitous” at first glance. Yet such an accusation is swiftly complicated, if not outright dismantled, by what follows: a deeply affecting monologue delivered by Crowl—stepping pointedly out of character—to recount her experience as a trans actress watching this scene during rehearsal. With piercing clarity, she evokes the grief of having been denied the rites of adolescent sexuality, of watching the scene not as an artist but as a witness to a painful absence in her own life. It is a moment of emotional detonation, a rupture that stains the preceding scene with retrospective sorrow.

The production’s daring does not plateau there. What begins as a kaleidoscopic descent into the hedonistic labyrinths of fetish and chemsex—rendered with hallucinatory stylization—yields, once again, to commentary. This time it is Greenspan who steps forward, breaking the fourth wall to offer a historiographical meditation on the origins of BDSM practices within queer communities ravaged by the AIDS epidemic. His address reframes kink not as libertine abandon, but as a cultural strategy: a deliberate act of resistance, of “recentering intimacy by decentering the penis,” to borrow the memorable phrase. This speech, delivered with the weight of lived history, collapses the gap between individual expression and collective memory, between erotic play and political necessity.

What emerges from all this is a play that is as self-conscious as it is self-revealing, a work that does not merely portray queer desire but actively excavates its sedimented histories, its inherited traumas, its ideological entanglements. Prince Faggot does not offer the audience the comfort of passive consumption; rather, it compels them to metabolize its provocations in real time. Tannahill is not content to shock—though shock he does—but insists on reconstituting the meaning of each jolt, each gesture, in the crucible of discourse. This is not theatrical provocation for its own sake; it is provocation as praxis, destabilization as dramaturgy, eros as excavation.

Prince Faggot (through July 27, 2025)

A co-production of Playwrights Horizons and Soho Rep

Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.playwrightshorizons.org

Running time: two hours without an intermission