“Prince Faggot” Sends Up Kink and Country

On a blue-lit stage, a naked man—blindfolded, trussed, and gagged—hangs like a deer from a pole. Pale and gleaming, he looks like a painting of St. Sebastian, rapturous in martyrdom, or the marble statue of the “Dying Gaul.” Until this moment, the Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill’s intermittently superb “Prince Faggot,” co-produced by Soho Rep and its temporary host Playwrights Horizons, has whisked us briskly through an erotic fable about people very much like the British Royal Family. But here it pauses. The young man in the ropes is not just a character in bondage; he’s the heroic nude, an icon of tension and surrender. Kink is so old, it’s classical.

The play’s title operates as a useful sorting device, sifting for audiences who are familiar with the way that the slur has been reclaimed or who are happy to bask in full-frontal sexual tableaux, staged by the director Shayok Misha Chowdhury with explicit brio. (If you can sing out “I’d like two tickets to ‘Prince Faggot,’ please” at the box office, then you are tall enough to ride this ride.) Chowdhury, who was named a Pulitzer finalist for his play “Public Obscenities,” is also a gifted director, and he arranges his actors on David Zinn’s chandelier-hung set with an eye for exquisitely composed, color-saturated stage images—as if, any moment, cameras might start rolling.

The plot is a future-set scenario that’s actually strangely familiar. In England, in 2032, a grownup Prince George (John McCrea) brings his Oxford boyfriend Dev Chatterjee (Mihir Kumar) home to meet and have a meal with his parents, Prince William (K. Todd Freeman) and Princess Kate (Rachel Crowl), as well as his understanding sister, Charlotte (N’yomi Allure Stewart). His parents try to be unflappable and supportive; his guest draws out their built-in prejudices. Thus, the play, for much of its central scene, is basically “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” with supporting narration by the company—“Dev is on good form through dinner”—and sudden, vivid diversions to the queer erotic. Whenever the lovers escape the family’s attention, the lighting designer Isabella Byrd throws deep shadows over their sometimes naked forms, turning their bodies into lubricious, moving Caravaggios.

The show actually opens in a lighter vein, with Kumar showing us the play’s inspiration: a 2017 photograph of the then four-year-old Prince George, which, at the time, caused a tempest in an online teapot. An adorable pose, an immaculate pink gingham shirt, beautifully combed hair, and—“Gay icon!” the internet declared, which led to complaints that social media was objectifying a child. The company of queer and trans actors, in a chatty introductory mood, show their own childhood photos, some meditating on the way one’s identity long predates sexual awareness. Tannahill then has them debate whether his whole project is exploitative. “Yes, there’s a real child named George, but obviously this is not his story. Only he can write that for himself,” Kumar says. “This is our story.”

This particular royal love story is not a fantasy, though. Dev is too clever to mistake his relationship with a prince for progress: he wonders if his Indian forebears would be appalled at his proximity to white British power, he rankles at the prospect of being a “Brown subject,” and he’s repelled by the way that he is abandoned by his lover’s family to the mercies of a hostile press. (“You know what your parents are thinking? Shit, we’ve got another Meghan,” Dev tells George.) The bossy royal communications director Jacqueline (the great David Greenspan, wearing an icy blond bob) promises to manage the tabloids, but death threats roll in all the same.

George loses his purchase on the increasingly anti-royalist Dev, and the young prince’s involvement with drugs and sex takes a self-destructive turn. “When all you have ever known is a life of formality and power, you begin to crave its opposite. The utter obliteration of the ego. One ritual world for another,” one of the play’s many narrators explains. As George abnegates himself at sex-chem parties, the unstoppable conveyor belt of succession carries him closer and closer to investiture, to stasis, to the status quo. Erotic surrender alone will not subvert or even really trouble the monarchy, which requires its own elaborately binding outfits and public displays of intimacy.

Tannahill is one of Canada’s leading writers: his other plays include a drama about da Vinci and Botticelli falling in love, and his most famous novel is probably “The Listeners,” from 2021, an eerie tale of a mysterious tone only some people can hear, which he also made into a television show starring Rebecca Hall. In 2015, he published a wonderful book-length manifesto, “Theatre of the Unimpressed,” in which he talked to a hundred people about stultification in the form. One friend said that she went to the theatre out of obligation; Tannahill’s own experimental tastes (in the book, he cites Gob Squad, Young Jean Lee, and Tim Etchells as touchstone artists) lead him to a particular impatience with realistic drama (e.g., “middle-class white people arguing over dinner”), but he sees timidity in the avant-garde, too. So how might the author of that manifesto criticize this play? “Prince Faggot” does, in fact, contain quite a lot of “white people arguing over dinner”—and you can sometimes hear Tannahill’s flagging belief in those components in the dialogue itself. (“He’s always been . . . more. Hasn’t he?” Kate says about her peevish, complicated son, which, the night I saw it, got a disbelieving laugh from the audience.)

Happily, in what “Theatre of the Unimpressed” calls “moments of misfire,” the play breaks away from the more uneven, gossipy House of Windsor stuff and breaks its own fourth wall. The introduction is a high point, as is any moment when Tannahill interrupts the action to allow the performers to talk seemingly as themselves. These can be revealing confessions or informative asides or both. In a brief but immensely moving speech, Greenspan notes that the fetish practice—the bondage, for instance, of which George is so fond—allowed gay men in the nineteen-eighties to enjoy a sexual repertoire that didn’t revolve around genital contact, a matter of life and death in the face of AIDS. And at the play’s pinnacle, Stewart, an extraordinary trans actress, takes the show back from the sulky boys by performing a soft-limbed voguing solo, plunging to the floor as her braids twirl around her. Stewart tells us that she is a real princess, since she has won the dance title Princess of the Pier. “Who is divinely anointed?” Stewart says. “Who here is chosen by God? I am.”

There are some odd rhythms in the play’s almost two-hour run time because Tannahill is, I think, exploring a kind of dominance dramaturgy, alternating shock (a naked scene, a violent rupture between lovers) with aftercare (a gentle address to the audience). That alternation does not seem entirely worked out yet, since he’s also, as much as possible, trying to stamp his boot onto the public’s pernicious obsession with royalty. In this, he’s sometimes foiled by the production itself, partly because it’s at its most fun when ghosts of old gay kings and queens come romping into George’s dreams, and partly because you can’t make much of an argument against sumptuousness when the costume designer Montana Levi Blanco keeps putting everyone in gorgeous clothes.

But, still, Tannahill gets us to wonder: Why are so many romance novels written about an obsolete nobility? Why do the tabloids report so breathlessly on this one British family? Our obsession with royalty does not seem like the kind of fetish that protects. When placed alongside the loving games George and Dev play in bed, the rules of a hyper-wealthy figurehead monarchy certainly seem utterly perverse. George, at least, probably has a safe word. You can’t say the same about people living under an extant peerage. By some estimates, a third of English and Welsh land is owned by the landed gentry and the aristocracy, many of whom were endowed by William the Conqueror after he invaded in 1066. That’s a long time for the same folks to hold the whip. ♦