It can safely be reported that the arresting new play “Prince Faggot” will not be staged in the United Kingdom anytime soon, and not because the title contains a slur for homosexuality. Rather, the prince of the title refers to Prince George, the 11-year-old son of Prince William and Princess Kate. Back in 2017, when the royal family was touring Poland and Germany, Prince George of Wales, only four years old at the time, struck a very stylish pose when he and his family were lifted away on a helicopter. Is this royal kid gay? Is it forbidden even to speculate on the sexual orientation of children?
Jordan Tannahill’s “Prince Faggot” opened Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons in a co-production with Soho Rep, and as the play makes clear in its first few minutes, all children have romantic desires even if they don’t know what sex is all about. It’s assumed that children are heterosexual, which is untrue, or that children are asexual, which is absurd.
“Prince Faggot” is half fantasy, about what would happen a decade from now if the adult Prince George were gay; and it’s part reality, about the childhoods of the gay and trans actors who perform in this world premiere production, which is replete with those same actors striking very elegant poses in photographs taken years ago. In other words, “Prince Faggot” is meta-theater at its best and most thought-provoking.
It doesn’t mean anything to call “Prince Faggot” the best play of the 2025-26 theater season, which is only about six weeks old. It does mean something to put Tannahill’s play in the same august company as Bess Wohl’s “Liberation,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Purpose” and Emil Weinstein’s “Becoming Eve,” all of which opened earlier this year. As with these American writers, Tannahill, a Canadian, is a great storyteller, and he runs fast and furiously with this riveting narrative: What happens if a contemporary prince comes out as gay and marries another man when he’s finally king?
Tannahill attempts to distance his George from the real George. An actor in “Prince Faggot” tells us, “Yes there’s a real child named George, but obviously this is not his story, only he can write that for himself. This is our story.” OK.
Also, in the Playbill credits, Tannahill lists the actors, and instead of giving us the characters they play, he identifies them with a numeral, one through six. Fortunately, on stage, he is far less timid. John McCrea delivers a most troubled and sympathetic Prince George, with K. Todd Freeman and Rachel Crowl playing his very supportive parents, William and Kate. As Tannahill sees this couple, the future king and queen are supportive to the point of incredulity. The pay-off is that their benign behavior in the face of a PR storm provides the launchpad for the double-cast David Greenspan to steal the show.
When George comes out to his parents, and in the process tells them about his new non-white boyfriend (the very charismatic Mihir Kumar, a real heartthrob), their major concern is that the prince came out to one of the palace’s gay butlers (Greenspan) five years earlier. When William and Kate finally meet the boyfriend on a weekend at Anmer Hall, they leave it to the royal family’s female publicist (again, Greenspan, being a comic delight) to probe into the young commoner’s past to warn him of the impending tabloid chopping block. There’s no time to lose: A photo of the two young men holding hands on the train from London has already appeared in the tabloids.
“Prince Faggot” shares a number of themes, especially the nature of privacy and celebrity, with the currently streaming Netflix documentary “Harry & Meghan.” Fortunately, Tannahill doesn’t turn his subjects into pathetic victims as they lounge around in luxury at their Montecito estate.
As written by Tannahill and performed by McCrea, Prince George quickly emerges as a real piece of work, a complex character who captivates without becoming a casualty of the press and the royal family a la Harry and Meghan — not to mention Princess Diana in many books, TV shows and movies.
This fictional George enjoys a sex life so unusual that all cellphones at the Playwrights Horizons theater get the pre-curtain bag treatment. The simulated sex is graphic and often features bondage. Tannahill’s ruminations on the royalty’s fondness for ritual and decorum makes this prince a perfect fit for the world of S&M play.
N’yomi Allure Stewart rounds out the cast playing Princess Charlotte. Kate and Williams’ youngest child, Prince Louis, may be relieved to know that Tannahill has left him out of this family portrait. Perhaps the playwright also should have eliminated his sister as well. Playing Charlotte, Stewart doesn’t have much to do, but she deliver a speech, based on her rehearsal interview, on what it means to be a princess at one of New York City’s drag balls. These spoken biographies, fictional or not, could interrupt the flow of the narrative; instead, under Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s astute direction, each solo moment enhances, and sometimes even dominates, the royal drama. Chowdhroy also manages to create glamor and grandeur, as well as real pathos, on a very small stage. His design team is top-notch: David Zinn (sets), Montana Levi Blanco (costumes), Isabella Byrd (lighting) and Lee Kinney (sound and original music).
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