Prince Faggot (5+*)

Fag Puddle with Crown and Wire by Salman Toor (2022)

Don't you love it when edgy theater blows your mind? And not just because of some sexual staging truly worth whatever bite an intimacy coordinator's salary took out of the limited budget of an off-Broadway play: Prince Faggot breaks the fourth wall with greater resonance than I've ever felt previously.

This "gay fantasia" for the New Millennium ranks right up there with A Strange Loop and Slave Play.  It grabbed me by the throat from the get-go when an extraordinarily charismatic actor (Mirhir Kumar) projects a photo of himself as a child whom he identifies as incontrovertibly queer prior to having any awareness of what that actually means. Several of the other performers (who are identified only by number in the Playbill, and not just because most of them play multiple roles announced by the cast early on) follow suit before Canadian-born playwright Jordan Tannahill provocatively shows his hand with a projection of Prince George that appeared in Vogue, People and other publications.  

Photo by Samir Hussein (2017)

I don't recall seeing the photo but according to the BBC, it caused a ruckus after the UK-based PinkNews reported that it had turned the prince into a "gay icon," the day before his 4th birthday.  Still, encountering it at Playwrights Horizon/Soho Rep eight years later immediately recalled a memorable response uttered by Mary Louise Parker in Longtime Companion when someone claims that her neighbor, a soap opera actor, is straight: " Well, he lives with another guy and they both have great bodies. You tell me."

Tannahill does, brilliantly, but we are way beyond closets in Prince Faggot.  In the scene that follows, set in the near future, Prince George informs his parents that he'll be bringing his brown boyfriend home from Oxford for the weekend.  Dev, played by Kumar, tries to make a good impression by giving the nonplussed Kate and William a first edition of The Waves as a house gift, a gesture soon interrupted by the emergency dispatch of the hilarious palace flack who reports that a picture of the couple holding hands has surfaced on the internet that very morning.  The Firm swings into action and Dev suddenly discovers he's in over his head, although George remains blasé.  He never has known anything different, given Fleet Street's longstanding obsession with the royal family.

We quickly discover what the men are "into" in a scene that literally throws back the curtain on gay sex, the first of several as necessary as they are explicit for juxtaposing the gulf between public and private behavior, one that has narrowed considerably in the age of camera phones.  Much later, an indiscreet George, fearlessly embodied by John McCrea, whines to Charlotte, the Princess of Wales, that he's the only gay man who's ever been forced to discuss chem sex with his grandfather, in this case the ancient but still breathing King Charles III.  It's followed by a drug-induced hallucination in which a quartet of former English kings and queens remind George that you can indulge your appetites so long as they're cloaked in the hypocrisy of marrying a "nice" white gay man whom you don't necessarily love.  History intervenes more soberly with the mind of Dev, a versatile queer theorist of sorts, who confesses he could never "bottom" for George because it would betray the millions of south Asians who were fucked by colonial Britain for centuries. 

Go for bitchy, brilliant comedy, but stay for Prince Faggot''s nuanced exploration of how our age and station in life influence the expression of out identities in bed and out. Obviously, this can have awful consequences as we have just seen for nearly two thrilling hours, but Tannahill gives incandescent N'Yomi Allure Stewart, who plays Charlotte ever-so-quietly, the final word. It's absolutely TRANScendent, although that's not to take anything away from the equally moving break-the fourth-wall speeches delivered by Rachel Crowl, K. Todd Freeman and David Greenspan. 

I sailed out of the theater pitying the prince and embracing my inner queen who had absolutely no idea what awaited him off the hobby horse. 

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