John McCrea and Mihir Kumar.
Photograph: Marc J. Franklin
The will to look in a mirror and see oneself adorned with a crown is a robust factor, an urge that motivates everybody from Macbeth to individuals who take pleasure in taking part in the online game Civilization. But when really ruling looks like a giant ask, and it’s too bloody or too excessive to think about usurping the king, possibly it’s simpler to search for a mirror within the polished floor of the crown itself: What if that completely pedigreed heir of an amazing colonial empire have been a bit extra such as you? Is that consolation sufficient, if the remainder of the system stays in place? Are illustration and resemblance their very own mandate of heaven? Or, as Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot places it, what would occur if, just some steps down the road of inheritance, there have been a man who liked being a bit of bitch in mattress?
The jumping-off level for Prince Faggot lies in a photograph that dominated a flicker of discourse on the app previously often called Twitter for a couple of days in 2017: A 3-year-old Prince George, the son of Will and Kate, gazing fondly at a military helicopter on a visit to Hamburg. Tannahill’s first scene has all of the fervor and self-righteousness you may count on from social media: A sextet of actors of their avenue garments sits on the lip of the stage discussing how, in that picture, the longer term king seemed very, effectively, you realize … homosexual. One of many actors, Mihir Kumar, leads the cost in a monologue that this system notes is drawn from his personal life evaluating that picture of George to a equally fey considered one of himself as a toddler (each are projected onto a display screen on the heart of the stage). He additionally describes getting right into a flame battle with a former good friend named Kendra who insisted he was sexualizing a toddler. The remainder unspools just like the replies below a viral put up. One other actor, performed by the nice Okay. Todd Freeman, insists it’s bizarre to say something determinative in regards to the sexuality of a child so younger, whereas a gleeful troll, performed by David Greenspan, interjects, “Frankly, I believe we’ve been doing a horrible job with the grooming. I imply look what number of straights there are nonetheless.”
Hypothesizing in regards to the sexuality of a younger prince is delicate and wealthy territory for drama, although not essentially as transgressive as all that throat-clearing makes it out to be. The producers, Soho Rep and Playwrights Horizons (who know dot their i’s after producing the non–Fleetwood Mac Stereophonic), observe within the play’s program that any resemblance Prince Faggot bears to actual occasions is coincidental, however the concept of a fey homosexual British prince is by now its personal mini-genre, whether or not within the escapist neoliberalism of Red, White & Royal Blue or the Household Man–model Instagram-caption humor of a one-season cartoon on Max. Tannahill’s take opens with one thing like a spec script for a future episode of The Crown: A university-aged Prince George (performed by the porcelain John McCrea, whom Montana Levi Blanco has wearing high-fashion shorts) brings his British Indian Oxford boyfriend, Dev (Kumar, well-groomed and intimidating, like each queer who majors within the historical past of artwork), residence to fulfill his household. Initially, Tannahill is sort of beneficiant in his portrait of the royal household, with Will (performed by Freeman) and Kate (Rachel Crowl) doing their greatest to be genially supportive of their son’s wishes, although they’re solely comfy along with his queerness to an extent. A dinner-table battle breaks out over the truth that they let him examine ballet (acceptably inventive) however balked at up to date dance (faggy). It’s a good level that desexualized cis-white gayness has develop into assimilated to the purpose of being acceptable within the highest echelons of energy, however I did get hung up on the notion that, given its observe file of lifeless royals, the Home of Windsor might produce an mental who has an opinion about Pina Bausch.
In these scenes, Tannahill’s writing might be cautious to a fault, with George and Dev spouting dialogue that could be reprinted from a gender-studies thesis or transcribed from an argument occurring in Bushwick proper now. (“There are different symbols obtainable to you,” Dev says of George’s curiosity in becoming a member of the military.) Prince Faggot’s humor is available in intermittently, a lot of it by way of appearances from Greenspan (working magic with a extreme bob when taking part in the royal press secretary) or in swipes about high-end queer signifiers. (Dev, within the midst of a battle, sputters that George ought to thank him for bringing him to dinner with Ocean Vuong; George will get his personal jab in by mentioning that Dev postures as a Marxist however has a subscription to Equinox.) Even in an invented actuality, Tannahill tends to disclaim himself and his characters the possibility to have a lot enjoyable, as if that may elevate extra objections to what’s already onstage. However individuals who is perhaps mad on the considered homosexual prince are going to be mad regardless. If we’re depicting posh buggery, I might go for extra of the lurid farce of Oscar Wilde, and even the leering imperial horniness of Alan Hollinghurst.
The play comes most alive in motion. Shayok Misha Chowdhury, glasslike and exact in his work in Public Obscenities, directs Tannahill’s drama prefer it takes place within the murky darkish room of a membership. He’s guided McCrea and Kumar right into a gently realizing intimacy, each in unstated communications they make with one another below George’s mother and father’ scrutiny and of their richly expressive intercourse scenes. The viewers’s telephones are positioned in Yondr pouches for good motive. Early on, we see Kumar and McCrea totally nude, as Dev fucks George on that journey to a rustic property in a scene that makes it clear that, as Dev places it postcoitus, the prince is a “chaotic backside” with a burgeoning curiosity in poppers. George’s need to sublimate himself grows because the play progresses: Chowdhury pulls again a curtain in a single montage to disclose the prince gagged, blindfolded, and tied up in shibari bondage; throughout a later drug journey, George fantasizes about being walked like a pet in a hanging tableau of postcolonial sexual humiliation.
That the royal agency would by no means settle for a prince who’s a real faggot is a foregone conclusion, and Tannahill’s drama stalls out as it really works its manner again to that very level, with George’s mother and father pressuring him away from sexual experimentation and towards a extra typical path. But when the travails of Dev and George develop into predictable, even with a hanging rain scene that Chowdhury phases by quoting 4 Weddings and a Funeral, Tannahill and Chowdhury properly shift the emotional heft of Prince Faggot onto fourth-wall-breaking monologues from its forged that develop and complicate what’s occurring inside its plot. Crowl, after that intercourse scene, displays on the anger she felt being disadvantaged of an actual childhood as a trans lady. Freeman will get a speech a few drama instructor who advised him that, as a Black man, he was taking part in a king improper in Henry V. Greenspan impishly, after which sweetly, remembers mates who supplied to show him about fisting through the AIDS epidemic. And N’Yomi Attract Stewart, who principally performs a wisecracking Princess Charlotte (and associate-directed the revised Cats), brings the manufacturing residence with a narrative about how her personal teenage need to develop into a princess was fulfilled not via some fairy-tale romance, however by incomes the title within the ballroom group, another royalty that somebody like Prince George might by no means hope to entry. That’s a sentiment that E.M. Forster, one other stuffy British F-word keen on the “aristocracy of style,” may effectively endorse.
Stewart’s speech offers Prince Faggot with a rousing conclusion, but it surely displaces the catharsis from Tannahill’s characters themselves. I used to be left eager to know extra, not about George — like many royals, he’s extra attention-grabbing as a logo than an individual — however Dev, who does and doesn’t stand in for the assumed positions of the playwright, director, and viewers. He’s a diligent leftist who’s written about Kara Walker, with a dad who canvases for Labour, and he additionally refuses to backside for George as a result of “my ancestors would by no means forgive me.” And but, this man additionally managed to fall laborious sufficient for an precise prince that he agreed to enter into the public-relations Noticed lure that may include relationship him publicly. Dev tells George he needs he’d resign the crown, however he additionally clearly derives sexual frisson from getting to slip his dick into the very arse of empire. Right here’s one other inversion: In a consensual relationship, the dom could appear in management, however he does give energy away to his sub, letting him decide the extent of the punishment, and agreeing, if solely implicitly, that one thing about him is value conquering. Dev, like Prince Faggot itself, could also be extra in awe of the throne than he would like to confess. What a phenomenal factor it may very well be to grab and stain.
Prince Faggot is at Playwrights Horizons.
