Location: Roger Bishop Theatre
Abstract:
Jordan Tannahill’s latest play, Prince Faggot, trades on controversy. His first major U.S. premiere, the play ran for over six months in New York and dominated the 2025 Off-Broadway season. It begins by recalling the 2017 photograph of four-year-old Prince George in an “adorably fey pose” and then speculates into the future by staging a kinky thought experiment: What if the future heir to the British throne were gay, and what might such a figure mean for queer people? But despite this queer fabulation, Prince Faggot isn’t really about the British royal family. Rather, like its confrontational title, the play offers a provocative paradox: Can a gay prince ever really be a …? The work moves beyond banal coming-out narratives and instead dramatizes what Tannahill calls a “second awakening” into queer adulthood, animated through sexual agency and radical self-redefinition. We argue the production’s diverse ensemble and reclamatory title operate as provocations against (hetero)normative respectability, insisting that royalty already exists in queer art and community practices. Our panel will address Tannahill’s play from multiple angles—the staging of intergenerational queer legacy, conflations of class and race, representations of queer teenage boyhood, performances of trans identities, BDSM and kink—in order to mine the richness of this vital contemporary play from one of Canada’s best-known playwrights and leading queer dramatic voices.
Abstracts
Bess Rowen (Villanova University), “And You Don’t Even Know It: Gay Teenage Boyhood and Ghosting in Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot”
Jordan Tannahill’s play Prince Faggot begins with a series of AMAB (assigned male at birth) performers discussing the photos that revealed the queer and/or trans adult they would grow up to be. The play does not live in boyhood, but it begins with a sense of a shared discomfort with the confines of straight cis boyhood that follow the performers and the character of Prince George into adulthood. The actor playing George in the original production has his own ghosted history of queer boyhood, as John McCrea is perhaps most famous for his Olivier-nominated performance as gay teen and wannabe drag queen Jamie New in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. Jamie and Prince George have very different levels of class privilege, but both characters embody a gay teen archetypal character who pushes people and boundaries via reactionary responses. What does it mean to look at Prince Faggot in terms of its depiction of mean gay teenage boyhood? And how is this theme highlighted by the casting choice of featuring a more grown up McCrea as the titular Prince?Benjamin Gillespie, Santa Clara University (bgillespie@scu.edu)
Benjamin Gillespie (Santa Clara University) “A Prince by any Other Name . . . Queer Time and Erotic Dissent in Prince Faggot”
Abstract: Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot stages a queer intergenerational dialogue purposefully fractured by direct address monologues and erotic kink play. These deliberate temporal ruptures subordinate the seemingly dominant royal plotline of Prince George in order to (re)center queer perspectives from actors of different ages and races. I argue that these moments of direct address pull the audience into a distinctly queer temporality in which the performers mine their own adolescent wounds and desires (reinforced by projected childhood photos), simultaneously melded with the real-life experiences of the playwright to question “what does it mean to be a faggot?” As Performer 3 states, “You will never know that wound… and I resent that you’ll never know. But I’m thankful you’ll never know.” To enhance its metatheatrical frame, the play’s Genet-esque quality of role play (sexual and otherwise) foregrounds the performance of identity as always unstable and contextual. In highlighting the playwright’s semi- autobiographical meditations on sexual awakening and self-reformation, this paper will argue that Prince Faggot foregrounds queer sex as a form of erotic dissent, implicating both performers and spectators in an act of queer world-making beyond the typical “coming out” narrative.
Alex Ferrone (Université de Montréal) “Homo Economicus: Prince Faggot’s Queer Critique of Class”
At the core of the controversy around Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot—beyond, of course, its provocative title—is the fabulation that appears to be its central plot: years from now, the adult Prince George, heir to the British throne and a bratty twenty-year-old twink, begins a Dom/sub relationship with Dev Chatterjee, a South Asian grad student four years his senior, who leads George into a journey of sexual reawakening and political reckoning. But this queer coming-of-kink story is hardly the point. Rather, it’s George and Dev’s increasingly heated debates about imperialism, race, and especially class that anchor the metaplay within Prince Faggot’s larger metatheatrical frame. Across a series of direct-address vignettes in which the performers interpolate elements from their own lives (or at least seem to), the play interrogates what it means to perform queerness, transness, and race and how these performances are everywhere inflected by the vicissitudes of class. My paper argues that Prince Faggot is, above all, animated by a trenchant class critique, one that identifies class—with its sprawling identificatory conflations—as the structural vertebra of all identity performance.
Biographies:
Alex Ferrone is Assistant Professor of English in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at l’Université de Montréal. He is the author of Stage Business and the NeoliberalTheatre of London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). His next book project, Tacky, theorizes embodied performances of class and their conflations with race, ethnicity, and queerness, while an additional book project seeks to recuperate the unpublished plays of Louis Peterson. He is the current Book Review Editor of Theatre Journal.
Benjamin Gillespie is Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at Santa Clara University and Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. His essays and reviews have been published in a wide range of journals and anthologies. His books include Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging (University of Michigan Press, 2026), Split Britches: Fifty Years On (University of Michigan Press, 2027), and The Routledge Companion to LGBTQ+ Theatre and Performance in North America (Routledge, 2027).=
Bess Rowen is Assistant Professor of Theatre and affiliated faculty in the Gender & Women’s Studies and Irish Studies programs at Villanova University. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment,was published by University of Michigan Press in 2021. She is currently working on her second book project, currently under advance contract with University of Iowa Press, which charts the evolution of staging teenage mean girls on the American stage. She is the Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre.