In 2032, a young man called Tips brings his boyfriend, Dev, home from college to meet the folks. Though cautious, Mum and Dad are neither surprised nor scandalized; after all, he’s 18, and they have known he was gay for a while.
For the characters in Jordan Tannahill’s “Prince Faggot,” though, that gayness was long since a given. Early in the play, we are shown a famous picture of Tips at 4, looking adorable and, to them, arguably fey.
Tips is better known to the world as Prince George of Wales, the oldest child of Prince William and Princess Catherine. The real Prince George is now 11. For that reason, I will hereafter refer to the character by his nickname. I am one of those who, as the play anticipates, resist the dragooning of a preadolescent boy into a dramatic argument about sexuality and monarchy — just as I cringe at the use of a slur I take no reclaimed pride in to market a title. If the playwright means to shock, mission accomplished.
But here’s the real shocker: The play, which opened Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons, in a co-production with Soho Rep, is thrilling. Inflammatory, nose-thumbing, explicit to the point of pornography, wild and undisciplined (except in its bondage scenes) — yes, all that. Its arguments have so many holes in them, most hold water only briefly. Grievance is its top note: Tips is a whiner and Dev a theory queen. Love is everything and never enough.
In other words, however objectionably conjectural, it’s real.
Tannahill tries to sideline reality quickly though. In a throat-clearing prologue, he has the six actors (all exceptionally good in multiple roles) debate the propriety of telling the story in the first place. One (Mihir Kumar) argues that since “all children are ‘sexualized’ as heterosexual by default,” exploring a different framing is a kind of reparation. Another (K. Todd Freeman) retorts that to portray an actual child as queer is to invite a charge of grooming. A third (David Greenspan) adds wickedly, “Frankly, I think we’ve been doing a terrible job at grooming. I mean look at how many straights there still are.”
If the debate is moot — you are meant, of course, to side with the playwright, or there wouldn’t be a play — it isn’t idle. As it flips back and forth, we are surreptitiously being introduced to the way the production, directed for maximal theatricality by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, will incorporate the personas and identities of the actors themselves. Each shares a photo from early youth as they consider how being queer, trans, white, Black or brown, in various combinations, informs their feelings about a possible gay royal.
That Dev (Kumar) is of South Asian heritage certainly contributes to his anxiety when meeting the Firm. “You know what your parents are thinking?” he asks Tips (John McCrea) after the introduction. “We’ve got another Meghan.”
But William (Freeman) and Kate (Rachel Crowl) are less concerned with Dev’s race than with managing the rollout of the romance to the press. The family’s history of sexual scandal (Prince Andrew is name-checked) allows Tannahill to squeeze the ironies of the situation like lemons. “Our job is to serve, not to make spectacles of ourselves,” William says, a comment met with derision by Tips’s tart sister, Princess Charlotte (N’yomi Allure Stewart). “With capes and crowns and motorcades, not to make a spectacle?” she crows. But some spectacles are trickier than others.
And so, in a hilarious “emergency meeting” at Anmer Hall, their Norfolk retreat, the Waleses deploy their terrifying communications secretary, Jacqueline Davies. Ensembled in blinding white from bob to bag — the costumes are by Montana Levi Blanco — Jacqueline (Greenspan) reveals that a photograph of the couple holding hands has already been posted online and will soon hit the tabloids. “We can control the story, or they can,” she says darkly.
As it turns out, though, no one can control the story — sometimes, it seems, not even the playwright. Though most of the media (except Piers Morgan) is supportive, the internet is soon spewing mockery (“Glad someone’s adding some spice to that Yorkshire pudding”) and worse. Tips, who has had years to develop a thick skin, laughs it off, albeit with the help of alcohol and party drugs. But Dev, understanding that the immense privilege protecting royals will never protect him, grows tired of his lover’s nonchalance. Soon there is separation, acting out, and an ugly, predictable descent into acrimony.
That’s a lot of story to cram into two hours, and in some ways I’ve barely scratched the hot surface of Tannahill’s ambition, which far exceeds the zany rom-com kitsch of Matthew López’s “Red, White & Royal Blue” and other gay royal fantasias. But if the author’s focus is too broad for his plot, with detours into AIDS and addiction creating a sort of disputatious blur, Chowdhury’s staging is as lucid as an oratorio. He perfectly sets up each actor for bravura solos that make their group scenes feel lushly choral.
It helps that the production (presented in the 128-seat theater on the fourth floor of Playwrights Horizons) gets enormous sensorial oomph from relatively simple elements. A slash of curtain slides diagonally across the stage to whisk scenes into and out of view (sets by David Zinn); deeply saturated light (by Isabella Byrd) suggests both royalty and debauchery; the thump of techno (sound and music by Lee Kinney) persists like a hangover.
But the hangover that the play highlights, despite its queer assertiveness, is not really about gayness. Tips’s public coming out is not, in the event, a big deal, and his sexuality no hindrance to his hereditary fate. (Tannahill does not go that deep into the future anyway, imagining only as far as Charles’s death, and William’s accession, in 2044, with a coda the following year.) The title, and the hubris behind it, are in that sense red herrings, or rather pink ones.
That’s just as well; the quickly accepted gayness of a wealthy white Windsor does not ultimately allow for a very effective critique of homophobia. What it does successfully dramatize, however, is the centuries-long headache of false exceptionalism that Tips embodies, even as a gay man. The monarchy, Tannahill argues, is no good for anyone, even aside from its cost: In promulgating a human hierarchy of unearned greatness it, in essence, dehumanizes everyone else, especially those who do not look like the inhabitants of the castle.
Driving this point home, Tannahill has the Black and brown actors step outside the narrative from time to time to explore their own royalty. In one of these sidebars, Freeman, who has been playing William, recalls a director who found his portrayal of Henry V in college too “gangster.” “This is what a Black king looks like,” he thunders.
In another, Stewart, who has been playing Charlotte, recalls her own accession to the throne in a vogue ball on a New York City pier. But her throne is earned: “When a group of marginalized people come together and deem each other royalty, and give each other status, it’s never going to be rooted in how much they have,” she says.
“This whole time you’ve been looking at a princess and you didn’t even know it!” she adds — which is just what I felt about the play. Beginning in pain and provocation, it finds its way to splendor.
Prince Faggot
Through July 13 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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