It’s hard to recommend a play whose name you can’t say out loud. “You have to see Prince…um….” I found myself sputtering countless times last week. “Prince F-slur.”
The play, which imagines Britain’s Prince George coming out as gay about 10 years in the future, is making headlines in spite—or maybe, in part, because—of its provocative title. After a sold-out summer run at Playwrights Horizons/Soho Rep, during which it was (fittingly) crowned a New York Times Critic’s Pick, Prince Faggot has returned Off Broadway for a second staging at Studio Seaview through November 9.
Much of the coverage has rightfully focused on the titular prince, played by John McCrea, and his lover Dev (a ravishing Mihir Kumar). But the heart of the play is held in the hands—or, rather, fists, to borrow a double entendre from the show—of the cast’s women: Rachel Crowl as Kate, Princess of Wales, and N’yomi Allure Stewart as her daughter, Charlotte. As George’s mother and sister, they ground the play in emotional reality, whether it’s Charlotte and George sharing a cigarette outside their grandfather’s funeral or Kate walking out in her pajamas when her son comes home high at 4 a.m. Between scenes, they break through the fourth wall to deliver monologues of their own, including the play’s final coda (which Stewart developed herself in collaboration with playwright Jordan Tannahill).
%2520Prince%2520Faggot%2520by%2520Marc%2520J.%2520Franklin.jpeg)
Crowl and Stewart are two trans women of different generations and backgrounds. Crowl is a former punk and longtime working actor who lives most of her year in Wisconsin, while Stewart came up in the New York ball scene and is mother of the House of Unbothered Cartier. I sat down with them to talk about creating royal characters, the reception of the play, and what it means to take up space as trans women on an Off Broadway stage.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.
Vogue: A lot of the press so far has been centered on the men in the show, so I’m excited to talk to you both about your performances, which felt like complete standouts. What’s been your reaction to the coverage?
Rachel Crowl: You go first, N’yomi, my daughter.
N’yomi Allure Stewart: My amazing mother. What you’re talking about is true, and I’ve been speaking about it…not from a place of anger. Can you blame that being people’s natural reaction? Can you blame the large demographic of people who are coming to see something titled Prince Faggot not being as interested in two trans women who already occupy bodies unfamiliar to the masses? As time went on, I naturally started to feel slightly invisible, not to the creative but to the audience. Within the play, cast, and team, I always felt seen and heard. As for the reaction, for me, my community, and the people I call family, they’ve been moved.
Even those not seen onstage find themselves moved, challenged, and inspired by the language. They know what it is to be loved and then have complications with status, power, and the freedom to do as one pleases. My friends were like, “I left not knowing if I wanted to fight or fuck or dance or scream, but I felt everything.” And that’s moving to say about a piece.
Crowl: Everything N’yomi said, amen. It’s lovely because N’yomi and I come from two different worlds and yet are bonded. There’s both a generational and experiential divide. I have a lot of straight friends who have come and seen the show, and I’ve been utterly delighted by the way my straight friends have taken to this play.
That is the beautiful magic trick of the play. It takes these things that often exist on the fringes, like fisting and kink and fetish, and puts them front and center. And it humanizes them and puts them in the context of actual lives. There’s something delightful about using the royal family—which we as Americans know far too much about without even trying—as a really useful metaphor for a lot of things.
%2520Prince%2520Faggot%2520by%2520Marc%2520J.%2520Franklin.jpeg)
You both deliver monologues during the play. N’yomi, I know yours is autobiographical; Rachel, yours is not. What were your respective entry points for those?
Stewart: I’ve been working with Jordan and Jeremy [O. Harris, a producer of Prince Faggot] on this play since the first reading back in 2022. And I remember Jordan was like, “What is your relationship to the royal family?” And we sat down to the side and just talked.
I told him I truly never cared about the royal family. If I could add a line to my monologue now, I’d say: “My family wasn’t even super political until Obama became president. That’s when I became aware that my family actually cared or was moved [by politics]. And it’s because they saw someone who looked like them.” And in my head, at that stage, being new in my transition and fresh to New York City—where there’s a trans woman on every corner, at least in the spaces that I’m in—I was like, That’s my royalty.
There are royals in my world that people don’t even see as royalty, who make people cry and scream when they get onstage. Their names are not known outside of my world, but they are so royal to me. They mean so much more to me than even celebrities do. You’re a celebrity, but you’re not Sinia [Alaia]. You’re not Tati [Miyake Mugler]. Jordan said it was moving, and we added it to the end. It made sense to land on this statement that if the royals are chosen by God, I’m chosen by God too.
Crowl: My introduction to [the monologue] was in my callback audition. Director Shayok Misha Chowdhury said, “Just try to be as simple and matter-of-fact as possible.” And I’m a workaday actor. I’ve been an actor for 30-plus years, and I transitioned a long time ago. I approached it as a beautifully written piece that I could do justice to.
Are all of the details mine? No, they’re not. I’m very much a gold-star lesbian. I would never have sucked a married man off in his garage in the suburbs because I am not interested in that at all. But I have a lot of friends who’ve done things like that—friends who’ve suffered violence and done sex work. And I’ve gone through periods of depression where I mourn times when I wasn’t me and the fact that I’ll never get that time back. You have to make this adjustment: Am I gonna resent that forever, or am I gonna pluck little gems out of that experience? So, in spite of not being able to be myself, I’ve still picked up all these useful little things along the way.
As an actor, all the details don’t have to be literally true to make them performatively true. [Tannahill] wrote such a beautiful thing for me to say in a very vulnerable moment. I’m thrilled that he and Misha created something where the women can be strong and interesting and conflicted and badass and then step outside the frame and be the same level of badass as these performers.
What about your royal personas? How did it feel to create your own versions of these known entities?
Crowl: First week of rehearsal, Jordan pulls me aside and says, “Rachel, you’re a really good actor. You can go full biopic on Kate. Knock yourself out.” And I literally ruined my YouTube algorithm for a month. It was all Princess Kate, all the time. I realized that the approach wasn’t about mimicking everything she did but finding things to give me a place to play to create my own Kate.
I knew things like costume and wig and dialect were going to help sell the thing. So the biggest thing was that we’re not playing this for laughs. It’s not being played for camp. It’s being played as if everything fucking mattered.
And then Misha said something that was the most helpful thing in the world. He was like, “William and Kate wanna be good millennial parents. They wanna be cool for their queer son, but they’re also the heads of the firm, which is like the last place you can be progressive or caring or empathetic.” And that was the joy of Kate—playing with that essential tension between wanting to be a good mom but also being the head of the firm.
Stewart: Charlotte’s young, and I didn’t search her a lot. I was just like, I’m a sister, I’m a spare, and my parents really don’t care, but they care. There used to be this line: “No matter how bad you have it, you’re the heir and I’m the spare.”
Jeremy said what was so powerful was that we were cast in these roles people normally wouldn’t put us in. You get to be a sister, a brother, a son, a prince, a princess, a queen, despite so many people telling you you can’t be that. So I leaned into that as a performer. I would ask myself, How does Charlotte sit differently? What is it to be royal and sit? It means something different when you slouch. What is it to be the sister who challenges her parents in aid of her brother?
The physicality of the play—in terms of the sex scenes, the rope play, the acid trip—allows the characters to convey so much without words. How did you each approach your physical choices?
[There’s a] scene where George and William go after each other and then Kate comes out. I made a conscious decision that, unlike every other time we see Kate, I would go out in the way I used to see my mom hold herself when she was worried.
I do a good deal of the scene from that physical place because I had seen my mom do that. Even though I don’t have sex with anybody, don’t get naked, don’t get tied up—I do get to put a pup mask on John [McCrea], and that is really fun—my experience of the physicality of the world is in contrast, through Kate’s stillness.
Stewart: When we were first in rehearsals, I didn’t want to vogue. I didn’t want to give the audience that. I thought a lot about who would be watching this show. We’re at this weird moment now where everyone wants to include ballroom in their stuff, and I’m not bashing that. I’m very thankful for the opportunities to bridge the gap. But as an artist I’m always asking, How are we including ballroom in this culture in a challenging, innovative way?
I’m always gonna keep it real. I’m never one to sit in silence. Because ballroom doesn’t need anyone. Ballroom exists as its own entity because of its exclusion from the world. So initially I didn’t know if I wanted to vogue for an audience of white people or white men or older people, who might limit my entire performance in this play to this single moment when they saw me vogue. After one show, a woman said to my castmate, “Great job, great acting.” And then she said to me: “Great dancing.” I felt limited to that. It’s still something that I grapple with.
But I vogue at the end to showcase that, if the royals waltz and wave and this is an upper echelon, my upper-echelon dance, my top tier, my royalty through dancing and movement looks like this. I’m forcing you to see me in this radical way. These theaters, stages, and audiences don’t look at girls like me. So every night I do this play, I’m like, This is my rebellion. When I vogue and dance, I carry so many other women with me.
Crowl: We have to work overtime to prove ourselves. I feel a certain amount of responsibility every time I set foot onstage or I’m on camera. I have to be as good as I can be to make sure that you see how good trans people can be. Every opportunity I get is a bigger opportunity to open the hole a bit wider for the people behind me. I want us to get to the point where we’re not talking about this anymore, and it’s just like, Rachel’s a great actor, period. N’yomi’s a great actress, period. And she’s trans, but who cares? It doesn’t matter. She’s just really good and can play anything we need her to play. That to me is the goal.
Stewart: I’ve been training for this since I was 16. I’m talented, but I’m unfamiliar. And I do crave the day when people will want to be familiar with me.
Crowl: They’re gonna. It’s happening, babe.