Is He, You Know ...

A gay romance inspired by a photo of Prince George is surprisingly conventional.

- JACKSON MCHENRY

PRINCE FAGGOT WRITTEN BY JORDAN TANNAHILL. PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS. THROUGH JULY 27.

THE DESIRE TO LOOK in a mirror and see oneself adorned with a crown is a powerful thing, motivating everyone from Macbeth to players of the video game Civilization. But if actually ruling is a big ask, maybe it’s easier to look in the polished surface of the crown itself: What if that perfectly pedigreed inheritor of a great colonial empire were a bit more like you? If the rest of the system stayed in place, would that be comfort enough? Are representation and resemblance their own mandate of heaven? Or as Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot puts it, What would happen if, just a few steps down the line of inheritance, there were a guy who loved being a little bitch in bed?

The jumping-off point for Prince Faggot is a photo that dominated a flicker of 2017 discourse on the app then known as Twitter: a 3-year-old Prince George, son of Will and Kate, gazing fondly at a military helicopter on a trip to Hamburg. In Tannahill’s first scene, a sextet of actors in their street clothes sit on the lip of the stage discussing how the future king looked very, well, gay. Actor Mihir Kumar leads the charge in a monologue drawn from his own life, comparing that photo of George to a similarly fey one of himself as a child, both projected onto a screen. He also describes getting into a flame war with a former friend who insisted he was sexualizing a child. The rest unspools like the replies under a viral post. Another actor, played by the great K. Todd Freeman, insists it’s weird to say anything determinate about the sexuality of a kid, while a gleeful troll, played by David Greenspan, interjects, “Frankly, I think we've been doing a terrible job with the grooming. I mean, look how many straights there are still.”