The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Prince Faggot

By Ross

Prince Faggot strides forward, not with a golden crown but an actor’s confession, based on childhood photos seen under a microscope. We’re queering and questioning our heritage and our birthright, as it surprisingly starts as a study, a cheeky anthropological dig into what we dare see in a photograph of a child. Do we see the telltale sign of a lineage, a secret, or a spark? The ensemble stands before us, clearly asking who we were before language, before desire, before gender and queer identity prefigured our expression; before our knowing and acknowledging. And what others thought we would become, should become, or are destined to become. But before it leans too far into the theoretical, director Shayok Misha Chowdhury (Public Obscenities) sweeps us into the glittering fan-fiction at hand: the highly entertaining and torrid reimagining of a modern-day rebellious royal romance between the fantasy, fantastic, young British Prince George and his compelling, sensual lover, Dev.

John McCrea (West End’s Everybody’s Talking About Jamie) as Prince George is deliriously sharp; all tight sparkle and simmering rebellion. He’s undaunted and deliberate, while also cautiously caught between duty and desire. Mihir Kumar (Commonwealth Shakespeare’s Cymbeline) as Dev is the fire and the freedom of the framing. As the devoted, at first, boyfriend, he easily becomes one of the most fascinating characters in the play. Dev is both a forceful Dom to his Prince Faggot: “Don’t talk to your Dom that way,” and a well-educated intellectual who easily stands up for himself, even if his views go against what the Royal Family wants from him, and he is absolutely not willing to be just a “friend” from school coming along for the weekend. He is wryly self-assured and deeply sympathetic, even when wildly overwhelmed by the unwanted attention, navigating his own identity while nudging the Prince toward something braver than anything either has ever known. When their guard is dropped for a split camera-ready second, their hands find each other’s on a train platform, and they are instantly caught, and through the dangerous lens of public obsession, their relationship explodes forth. Royalty hasn’t changed, but love has in the public’s eye.

Playwright Jordan Tannahill (Declarations) writes plays with shock. He has been described as “the enfant terrible of Canadian Theatre” by many, speaking a language in code and cadences that resonate. His plays and novels are layered with insight and charisma, but with this play, his writing also surprises in its multiplicity. Prince Faggot is part fairytale, part fever dream, part dramaturgical interrogation, and part entertainment. And the energy is effusive, especially when gifted with a character like Performer 5, energetically portrayed by David Greenspan (ATC’s I’m Assuming You Know…), who lovingly reminds George of his place with withering accuracy. The Prince is rightfully told that anything can be made into an issue by the media now, and as the future King William and father of George, portrayed beautifully by K. Todd Freeman (PH’s Downstate), sits side by side with his wife, wondrously portrayed by Rachel Crowl (LaJolla’s As You Like It), the two say, with all honesty, all the supportive dialogue we would all hope to hear, with Performer 4, captivatingly played by N’yomi Allure Stewart (Public’s A Raisin in the Sun) never too far away to lend a hand as either sister or servant.

There are plenty of things to set the air on fire inside Studio Seaview, with sexual nudity, poppers, and penetration on full display, sometimes even hanging its sexual stance from the ceiling in a manner most thrilling (aerial effects and staging by Paul Rubin). Visually, the design team conjures court decadence and rave energy with almost impossible clarity. The stage, designed by David Zinn (Broadway’s Enemy of the People), may look elegantly simple at first glance, but it’s anything but. Isabella Byrd’s lights carve out hallucinations and intimacies most strikingly; the costumes by Montana Levi Blanco (TNG’s Daddy) rewrite tradition in delicious, honorary detail; and Lee Kinney’s sound beats beneath it all like a heart pulsing through royal fortitude and excitement. One breathtaking, hypnotic scene, a kind of ghostly queer Benediction of sorts, rolls us back to the epic Angels in America, where ancestral figures appear not as oppressors, but as a lineage of liberation. It doesn’t have Kushner’s sharply tuned precision, but something electric and empowering does charge the air in a way that can’t be denied.

The most fascinating and deeply human interpersonal tension of the play exists between the desperate Prince George and determined Dev. It’s a rain-drenched, imperfect, relatable love story that refuses to romanticize itself into oblivion. Dev’s strength stands solid, even as he becomes drenched to the skin. He is beholden to no one nor any institution, not even the romance that stands pleadingly before him as the Prince’s journey stumbles slightly in the final crest. Yet, the emotional integrity never wavers. It’s messy. It’s human. And it’s the whole bloody beautiful point of it all.

The show’s captivating opening confession lingers in the back of our triggered minds, returning like chapter title pages to a large, more epic history book at hand. Are these the performers’ real stories, leaking onto the stage? And has Tannahill smartly woven them into the text? Will their monologues shift if the cast changes? Will they stay authentically derived from the actor before us? Or are the stories set in stone now that the play has become something of a phenomenon?

That blurred authorship makes Prince Faggot not simply a play but an astute invitation to consider how we inherit the right to be who we are, royal or otherwise, and to question what it costs when a world built to contain us fails to comprehend us. It’s not perfection, this royal unwrapping, but Prince Faggot is something far more rare. It’s an audacious ritual of reclaiming, stitched with glamor and grit, teetering on its own crown. Many in that house, including myself, will have the desire to return (particularly this Commonwealth Canadian gay man), not to solve the layered puzzle set out before us, but to sink deeper into its thorny, glittering truth. and see something we haven’t noticed before in this particular framing, even if we all saw the signs.