“Prince Faggot” at Playwrights Horizons (Photo: Marc J. Franklin)

I’m finding it difficult to articulate how I felt about Prince Faggot, Jordan Tannahill’s new play and his New York debut after a successful career in the U.K. There are many things to admire about it – its audacious premise, its strong acting ensemble, its eye-catching set, costumes, and lighting from David Zinn, Montana Levi Blanco, and Isabella Byrd, its electric staging from director Shayok Misha Chowdhury. So then what is leaving me so puzzled by the way it all hangs together? 

I think it starts with the title and what the title is saying to the audience. In the weeks leading up to opening, I saw the title obscured as Prince F*ggot in print. When I arrived at Playwrights Horizons, the box office and front of house staff were also dutifully censoring it, this time as Prince F. Tannahill’s title follows the lineage of Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping & Fucking – deliberately provocative and, as other editors might decree, unprintable. Both titles are confrontational, but who is the intended recipient of that confrontation?

The word “faggot” is only still shocking to straight people for whom it is an insult. Now, we queers wear our faggotry as a badge of honor. Tannahill’s play imagines Prince George as an adult, comfortable with his sexuality, loudly a faggot. He’s into BDSM and Chowdhury’s production shows us that – graphically, more than once. Our phones are secured in Yondr pouches, generally an indication of extreme nudity, and there is, indeed, a lot of it. And simulated sex and a wordless scene of rope suspension bondage, all of which seem to ask a matinee lady to clutch her pearls. But matinee ladies aren’t going to a play called Prince Faggot. 

So then take the shock factor out of it – if these depictions of gay sex are for the audience of gay people, are we meant to think they’re hot? Are we meant to be turned on by the two attractive actors humping in a 120-seat theatre? The metaphor is explicitly articulated: Prince George’s brown boyfriend is fucking him, a reversal of the way the monarchy fucks its subjects of color. It’s not particularly subtle, or artful, leaving the blunt force of Tannahill’s point ramming the audience. So we’re all getting fucked. Happy Pride. 

Tannahill is showing us queer life as it is for a wide majority of people: fetish, chemsex, and addiction included. These aren’t the nice, tidy gay people you see on TV. George is young, hot, entitled, and rich, and he’s following in his uncle Harry’s footsteps in wringing the enjoyment out of that while he still can. But in his hedonistic pursuits, he’s only covering the pain of his family, and, eventually, his loneliness. 

Doesn’t that then bring us back to a gay stereotype we see all the time: sad and lonely, George filling the void? I’m not so sure. Tannahill is showing us the full breadth of this character, his lust, his desire, but also his mistakes and his hubris. It’s complicated and I don’t think the play’s runtime allows us to get in there and look around enough. An acid trip scene towards the end serves as a kind of deus-ex-machina by way of Angels in America. His dead ancestors appear in his bedroom and berate him with advice, which wraps up his plotline a little too neatly. 

But the speculative fiction part of Tannahill’s play doesn’t ultimately feel like its point. There is a framework around the play where the actors deliver monologues as themselves, relating to or distancing themselves from the idea of princedom and faggotry. A long prologue from Mihir Kumar talks about seeing a childhood photo of yourself and recognizing your queerness, long before you were a sexual being. The excellent Rachel Crowl, after watching George get railed, delivers a moving monologue about being denied the joys of queer youth as a transgender woman. K. Todd Freeman spits back at an acting teacher who told him his depiction of Henry V was too Black. David Greenspan, characteristically phenomenal, recounts a story from the years of the AIDS epidemic where a friend told him that fisting someone lets you “feel their heartbeat. Around your hand.” And N’yomi Allure Stewart, princess of voguing, interrogates our assumptions of royalty. 

These outer brackets surrounding the George story are more interesting and better conceived than what happens elsewhere. Which is not to dismiss a truly captivating, intensely emotional performance from John McCrea as George. But I struggle to reconcile how the play’s two strands communicate with each other. Is George’s odyssey through sex and drugs meant to show us how he is squandering his privilege? And are the ensemble’s monologues meant to show us how they didn’t – and in some cases still don’t – have that ability? Or is Tannahill just showing us a company of queer actors and, incidentally, an array of the queer experience?

I don’t necessarily even want it to be resolved. I don’t even need the closure of fully getting it. It’s an intentionally messy, ragged play and it needs to be. I’ve been wrestling with it for days and am still not even sure that I’ve landed on an “opinion” about it. Playwrights Horizons and Soho Rep are to be applauded for programming something like this – it takes confidence and intelligence to read this play and see what it could be, even if it’s not entirely successful.