Stage Door News

New York: Jordan Tannahill’s play “Prince Faggot” will have its world premiere Off-Broadway in May 2025

Monday, October 28, 2024

Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill's new work Prince Faggot will get a world premiere via Playwrights Horizons and Soho Rep, who are co-producing. Performances will begin in May 2025 in Playwrights' Peter Jay Sharp Theater, with specific dates to be announced.

Tannahill, who wrote the piece, will star in the work, his Off-Broadway debut. According to press notes, the "meta-theatrical satire" will feature a queer, trans, and non-binary acting ensemble exploring power, privilege, and colonization by imagining a world ruled by a queer monarch. Shoyok Misha Chowdhury is directing.

“We may be imagining royals in this play, but the ensemble are the leads, the protagonists, as we think through the ways colonization has shaped our lives, the ways our sexualities intersect with power, and the ways we talk about queer childhood—and why, so often, we don’t," says Tannahill in a statement. "I’ve found the way to engage in topics like this is not to shy away from them. The intent is less provocation than to speak as clearly, and honestly as possible—and perhaps to ask why that can sound so provocative.”

"Jordan has written the kind of audacious theatrical experiment that excites me most as a director," adds Chowdhury. "The play asks us to consider why there are corners of our imagination where we don't allow sexuality to trespass. What are the pearls we're still clutching? At its heart, Prince Faggot is a love story. It’s a group of performers allowing themselves to inhabit characters that are usually off-limits to them, and through that act of irreverence, inviting us all to imagine a little more freely.”

Tannahill’s plays, performance texts and productions have been presented at venues including The Young Vic Theatre (London), Sadler's Wells (London), Festival d'Avignon (Avignon), The Kitchen (NYC), The Lincoln Centre (NYC), The Deutsches Theater (Berlin), The Volkstheater (Vienna), Canadian Stage (Toronto), Festival TransAmériques (Montreal) and on London's West End. He has twice won Canada’s Governor General's Literary Award for Drama: in 2014 for Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays, and in 2018 for his plays Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom.

His debut novel, Liminal, won France’s 2021 Prix des Jeunes Libraires. His second novel, The Listeners, was shortlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize, and adapted into a series for the BBC.

Playwrights and Soho Rep are producing Prince Faggot by special arrangement with Jeremy O. Harris and Josh Godfrey of bb2. Prince Faggot will be Soho Rep's second production at Playwrights Horizons—the esteemed Off-Off Broadway theatre has to depart its longterm home in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood at the end of this year. For the next two to three years, Soho Rep will produce shows at Playwrights Horizons' smaller stage.

Visit sohorep.org.

From Logan Culwell-Block for  playbill.com and from www.jordantannahill.com.

Photo: Jordan Tannahill. © Caio Sanfelice.