During the COVID-19 pandemic, playwright Jordan Tannahill saw his work dry up. So like many creatives, Tannahill had to venture into a new industry, which is how he found himself becoming a fetish sex worker, acting as a dom to a variety of people, including CEOs and politicians. As it was happening, Tannahill decided that when the theatre industry reopened, “I didn’t want my life, my lived experience to be more exciting than the theatre that I was writing.”

Enter his provocative play Prince Faggot, which after a well-received run at Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons (a co-production with Soho Rep) earlier this year, was transferred to a larger space at Studio Seaview, where healthy ticket sales have extended the play multiple times, until December 13. For Tannahill, who’s from Canada and lived in London prior to this momentous New York debut, it’s been a whirlwind because for one, he had a very hard time finding anyone who would produce it.

The main reason: The play was inspired by a 2017 photo of Prince George of Wales, the son of Prince William, laughing with delight at being inside a helicopter, his hands placed delicately on his face. As a character in Tannahill’s play remarks: “I remember literally hundreds of people on social media sharing this photo and calling George a ‘gay icon’ for his adorably fey pose.” That photo also inspired a thought exercise for Tannahill: What if Prince George grew up to be gay? How would he be able to express his sexuality within the strict confines of the British monarchy? What if he, like his uncle Harry, fell in love with a commoner?

That act of imagination forms the backbone of Prince Faggot. It also contributed to the play being met with “a lot of resistance and fear” when Tannahill was trying to get it produced in London, because it mentions the British royal family by name. One day, Tannahill was venting his frustrations to playwright Jeremy O. Harris, who is no stranger to causing conversation with his work (Harris did write Slave Play after all).

“He’s like, ‘Let me read the script,’” recalls Tannahill. “He read it, loved it, and said, ‘Let’s just do it in New York.’ And the things that felt like liabilities became, in his eyes, really great assets to the play in New York.” Harris helped develop the play via his company bb² and championed its world premiere. 

It does help that there is far less reverence for the British monarchy in New York, though the play isn’t actually about that. In fact, Prince Faggot opens on six gay and trans performers remarking on their own reactions to that photo of Prince George. They also frequently interrupt the events of the play to remark on their own coming out or journeys of self actualization. Audiences are reminded again and again, from the time they enter the theatre and see the stage, with the actors’ dressing rooms in full view—this is a play.

Below, see exclusive photos of the cast of Prince Faggot in their onstage dressing room.

Surprisingly, New York audiences have had no issues with the layers of storytelling in Prince Faggot. Remarks Tannahill: “​​I was really curious how the show would meet this particular inflection point in American politics with Trump’s Neo-fascist rampage. And I have found that, and audiences have expressed to me, the power of seeing these stories on stage, our community on stage—the depiction of joys, and also the complexities of queer pleasure and the pursuit of that. Ultimately, the story is about centering our own experiences, in a way that kind of interrogates how power and colonization and these brutal forces play upon our lives. But also the ways in which we nevertheless persist, and are opulent or powerful within our own lives.”

There’s a central narrative that anchors Prince Faggot: a college-aged Prince George (played by John McCrea) decides to come out to his parents William (K. Todd Freeman) and Kate (Rachel Crowl). He also introduces them to his boyfriend Dev, who is a British-Indian (Mihir Kumar). But while any other writer would take a more rom-com/Hollywood approach by having the coming out be the main crux of the story, Tannahill is more interested in portraying the nuances of modern queer life in all of its racial and gender diversity.

The narrative is broken up with the actors playing these characters breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience—using moments in the play as jumping off points for their own personal reflections. In one poignant moment, Crowl (playing a version of herself) admits that seeing a romantic scene between George and Dev made her feel angry: “I’m not sure if anger is the right word, but this—this overwhelming feeling of having been denied the experience of being a trans girl, like 18 or whatever, and having just a normal first kiss, first crush, first romance. You know? Like, not sucking off some married man in his garage in the suburbs, or hearing about your friend getting their head caved in by a lead pipe.”

Sure, Prince George is a character, but he’s also, as Tannahill puts it, “a vehicle to ultimately tell our own stories.” And not just the typical coming out variety. There’s frank portrayals of sex on the stage, as well as fetish culture—the onstage George is frequently portrayed as wanting to be dominated, to feel less power as someone who has so much of it. At one point, actor David Greenspan interrupts the narrative to talk about how at the height of the AIDS crisis, there were lesbians who taught gay men about fisting in order to give them another mode of sexual expression.

“For those who have less of an exposure to, or no exposure to, the world of queer fetish … these images are not in this place merely for shock value,” states Tannahill. “These images are about communicating, first of all, an intimacy between these two men. But they also are rooted in this legacy of queer survival and joy that this play is in conversation with.”

All of these reflections seem intensely personal, by design. But they were actually constructed by Tannahill.

There is one exception, the monologue that closes the play, delivered by N’yomi Allure Stewart, who compares the British royals to queer Ball culture. Stewart performs a fierce vogue routine, ending with a death drop, before saying that at a recent ball, “I got deemed Princess of the Pier … 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. You’re a legend or icon because you make it hot in your category. You’re around. You know how to run a house. You know how to be a mother, to give back, in the way you grace the stage, in the way you teach, in the way you love. It is earned.”

That powerful monologue was based on a conversation Stewart had with Tannahill one day in rehearsals for Prince Faggot. She’s credited in the script accordingly and will receive a percentage of the royalties from the play.

When asked about future plans for Prince Faggot, Tannahill is circumspect. He’s been completely satisfied with the reception of the play in New York, and if there are future productions, he wants it to be just as diverse, noting wryly, “A very specific kind of ensemble has to perform this show, which is exciting. And probably will make it a very rarely performed piece, which I’m totally comfortable with.”

Tannahill’s not even sure if he wants a bigger venue for Prince Faggot, because more attention to the play might mean its complexity would be flattened to stir controversy; he’s particularly fearful of its actors experiencing harassment. As he says emphatically, “I only really want it to be done right. I just think particularly—because of the moment that we’re in, and the ways in which trans identity, in particular, is being so weaponized at the moment—I don’t want to be careless with the safety of the performers who are in the show, or the queer and trans communities in whichever city this play is ultimately performed. And I want to be very thoughtful about where we do this. So at the moment, it’s just New York. We’ll see beyond that.”

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Photos: Backstage Polaroids of the Company of Prince Faggot

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