Theatre in Review: Prince F-----T (Playwrights Horizons/Soho Rep)

	N'yomi Allure Stewart, John McCrea. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

You may think you hear enough about the Windsors already without having to attend a play about them. After all, they constitute a longer-running and more convoluted soap opera than Coronation Street or EastEnders. But Jordan Tannahill's new play comes with a twist: Like Mike Bartlett's King Charles III, it is a work of speculative fiction but it treads further into taboo territory, imagining George, the heir to the throne after William, as the monarchy's first avowedly queer prince. (Note: The second word of the title, which rhymes with "maggot," is being redacted not out of squeamishness but to keep next week's newsletter out of thousands of spam folders.)

Set initially in 2032, Prince F. posts William and Kate as the proud parents of their homosexual son. But guess who's coming to dinner: George's first serious boyfriend is Dev Chatterjee, a commoner and a man of color with little admiration for the monarchy. It's rough going from the start: The young lovers, ready to go public with their relationship, are surprised to learn that a photo of them briefly touching hands on a railway platform is about to appear in the tabloid press. Nothing has been announced, and already everyone is in damage-control mode. And, as Dev quickly discovers, love in a royal goldfish bowl isn't fun: Handlers swoop in, security details are deployed, and death threats appear in his inbox.

One of the play's principal ironies is that Dev's sexual orientation is less inflammatory than his ethnicity and class. As he tells George, "You know what your parents are thinking? Shit, we've got another Megan." In a way, he's right. And, as royal duties continuously separate the lovers, George starts showing distinctly Harry-ish characteristics, hurling accusations at his parents, binging on drugs, and making a spectacle of himself in nightclubs. Meanwhile, a new, more socially acceptable boyfriend is teed up for George, their impending nuptials carefully worked into a crowded palace social schedule. As Dev ruefully notes, "There are some kinds of queerness that will never really be allowed in through the front door. Maybe it can sneak in through the back, from time to time, but mostly, it's kept on the curb where it belongs."

Prince F. has interesting points to make about anti-queer prejudice in this day and age, and the royals are prime targets for satirists and social commentators. Still, one may have mixed feelings about its treatment of George, who, as of this writing, is an eleven-year-old boy. A photo of him, striking a notably fey pose, is presented, amusingly, to suggest that he is a homosexual in training. Fair enough, and it is interesting to speculate how the monarchy would respond to such a development. But depicting the nineteen-year-old version of George as a meth-addicted basket case with a taste for sexual humiliation hardly seems sporting. You may wonder if Tannahill is any less exploitative than Lachlan Murdoch and his tabloid cohort; at times, the line between Prince F. and a Daily Mail expose seems perilously thin.

More damagingly, Prince F. never makes its central relationship credible. Dev is a well-read adult with fully formed opinions and strong political commitments; an art history student, he has published several essays. George, in contrast, is an angry adolescent whose main interests are modern dance and bondage scenarios. (Among his grievances: His parents would have supported his career in ballet but not in modern dance; oh, the horror.) In an eleventh-hour dream sequence featuring many of his historical predecessors, he is told, by no less an authority than James I, "Unlike your father, you have true vision, you have real ideas about the way we live in the world." Watching the play unfold, one is hard-pressed to believe George has any ideas at all. And for all of Dev's realism --"Long after I'm out of your life," he tells George, "you're going to be able to be a dozen, a hundred different things in their eyes, a prince, a philanthropist, a father, a king, a legend, and all I'll ever be is the brown piece of ass you had at uni" -- he often seems remarkably clueless about the duties and obligations, including military service, with which George is entailed.

Some of these problems might be alleviated if one weren't constantly comparing Tannahill's characters with their real-life counterparts. The playwright especially has no idea how to handle Kate and William, who are, alternately, benign and (in a poorly handled revelation) scheming. Interestingly, the play leaps to life when the actors step out of their roles to offer personal commentary. Rachel Crowl, looking on an intimate encounter between Dev and George, ruefully notes "this overwhelming feeling of having been denied the experience of being a trans girl, like eighteen or whatever, and having just a normal first kiss, first crush, first romance." After a tableau showing George hooded, gagged, and on a leash, the great David Greenspan, recalling the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic, notes, "The thing I think some people forget, or maybe don't even realize, is that fetish -- the leather, the latex, the BDSM, fisting -- I mean, it was on some very fundamental level about survival. About decentering the penis as the, the sole focus of sex." Oddly, such glosses are usually more interesting than the play's basic text.

Keeping Prince F. watchable is its cast assembled by director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, a blend of old and new faces, all of them sparkling personalities. As Dev, Mihir Kumar is a strikingly charismatic presence with a finely developed vocal instrument, who easily provides the action with an anchor. John McCrea, best known for starring in the West End musical Everybody's Talking About Jamie, has a nice Roddy McDowall quality as George, his charm and petulance inextricably linked; he goes a long way toward alleviating some of his character's grating qualities. Crowl is a real find as Kate, as is N'yomi Allure Stewart, doing a lot with the thankless role of George's sister Charlotte, who is all too aware that her "real job...is to be a kind of beautiful void." As William, K. Todd Freeman shines in one of the strongest scenes, a confrontation about George's drug use that climaxes with him flinging countercharges about his father's infidelities (admittedly, another bit of Hello! magazine editorializing.) A play in which Greenspan doesn't stop the show would be very strange indeed, and he does it again here as Jacqueline, the royal press secretary, who, removing her glasses to level with the young men, warns them in deadly earnest, "Anything can be made an issue. The way you close a car door can be an issue. They are going to find every single scrap they can on you, and we have to be ready with a response when they do."

For a play that trips through various states of reality, David Zinn has designed a highly workable space: A vast, largely empty, raised stage with a pair of imposing crystal chandeliers, a fly-in dinner table, and views of the actors in their dressing room upstage. Isabella Byrd's lighting shifts between warm washes and cold, almost work-light, looks for scenes of extratextual commentary; she also delivers some nifty, frantic dance-club chases. Montana Levi Blanco's costumes feel accurate to the characters; the white pantsuit, a true power outfit for Jacqueline, is especially apt. (And hats off to Cookie Jordan's wig and hair designs.) Lee Kinney's sound design includes eerily synthesized vocals composed by him plus snatches of electronic dance music.

By the time Prince F. reaches its climactic wedding, featuring some hilariously spot-on color commentary by a pair of clueless BBC reporters, this seemingly provocative piece oddly reminded me of The Student Prince and all the other vintage plays and musicals in which true love must surrender to the responsibility of the throne. For its grand finale, it switches gears for a lovely aria by Stewart recalling her boyhood, her gender transition, and eventual entrance into the ballroom scene. It's a beautifully detailed piece of writing that, at long last, gives this gifted performer something challenging to do. It's also a telling symptom of a play that doesn't always know where its real strengths lie. The hell with the Windsors; Jordan Tannahill has much more interesting things to write about. --David Barbour