Brandon Flynn Dives Into This Summer's Wildest Plays: Spirit of the People and Prince Faggot

It’s been a great year of theater for actor Brandon Flynn.

In January, he played none other than Marlon Brando in Gregg Ostrin’s off-Broadway drama Kowalski, a play that pits young Marlon against playwright Tennessee Williams as he vies for the role of Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire. Of Flynn’s performance, our critic said, “His unbothered swagger is Stanley Kowalski, a man of great appetites and no compunction about wiping his greasy fingers on his magnificently fitted T-shirt.”

Now, Flynn is starring in a different Williamsian drama of a far different sort, Jeremy O. Harris’s new, description-defying play Spirit of the People, at Williamstown Theatre Festival.

On a basic level, Spirit of the People is a sprawling dark comedy-drama-revenge tragedy about a group of gay friends on vacation in Oaxaca, Mexico, who stumble upon a Mezcaleria run by a mysterious Mexican woman and a Canadian expat with a secret about her former husband. But Harris has far more up his sleeve than that, as the play becomes an indictment of colonialism while skewering tourism, gender politics, contemporary queerness, and general societal norms. Flynn plays Dylan, an obnoxious social media  influencer and frenemy whom none of them seems to like, until several of them end up in a Covid lockdown-fueled polycule.

But while his soul is in the Berkshires, Flynn’s heart is in New York City, where his husband, the writer Jordan Tannahill, is causing a stir off-Broadway with Prince Faggot, a Playwrights Horizons/Soho Rep co-production. The pair met in 2022 through an early workshop of the play in which Flynn was taking part, and got engaged over Christmas 2023 as they took care of Tannahill’s terminally ill mother. They married last October at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.

Thinking about that play’s success—you can barely get a ticket now—brings Flynn to tears. It’s an emotional time in his house, and he’s proud to have a hand in all of these different experiences.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

It’s rare to have the experience of going into a play and knowing nothing about it. And I knew nothing about Spirit of the People. There’s not even a blurb about it on the website. 
It’s kind of Jeremy’s brilliance. He really wants a magic moment for the audience to not know much and be swept away in the story he’s crafted. I’ve witnessed him produce other plays and do the same thing, where he doesn’t give much away, and the audience gets to experience it for the first time.

Tell me about when you first read it and what your reaction was.
Well, it’s a known secret that a lot of us got the script and it ended at Act 1. It was not finished when I first read it, so, in many ways, my reaction was curiosity. What becomes of all these characters?

It felt like a world that I knew, in a way. I had actually gone to Mexico a couple of months prior to reading it with a group of friends. Jeremy has a good grasp on what a gay male friend group feels like. And the character, Genevieve, played by Amber Heard, I did see that woman in Zipolite, someone who is an expat who tries to create a new life in this beach town.

But I had no clue that it would go in the direction it went.

I certainly did not expect it go the way it went.
It really gets epic. We talked a lot about Almodóvar, and it reminded me of Charles Busch and Psycho Beach Party. It does this thing that I really crave. We used to have queer works that could hold a lot and go for the gold and really be a stylized, crazy, camp piece. In so many ways, we’ve reduced queerness to identity politics, and in Jeremy’s world, he’s never shied away from really running the full gamut of human emotions, with three-dimensional people telling the story.

You’ve spent so much of this year in Tennessee Williams mode—you were in Kowalski, you’re doing this Williams-like play that shares a stage with Camino Real.
I’ve read Williams for years. I was a drama kid since I was 11, so I know all his classics. Doing Kowalski was a beautiful way into all his work, and I got so excited [about Williamstown] because … I mean, Camino? When would ever get to see that?

I’ve been living in Williamstown for a bit now, so I’m meeting all the locals. When they start speaking about the festival, they say it feels different this year. They’re interested and curious why they wouldn’t do Glass Menagerie and his other commercial successes. Now that we’ve opened, those locals are like, “Whoa, I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Jeremy and Raphael Picciarelli have done a really good job of programming the festival and piquing everyone’s interest and not just delivering what people might expect. I mean, we have The Gig here, which is based on one of Tennessee Williams’s novels, and it’s an ice-skating show. I remember hearing people talk about it and being like, “What is that? That’s not Williamstown.” And, of course, it’s one of the most beautifully received shows now. Everyone’s blown away by it.

We have this wonderful meeting of people who have a traditional sense of theater and wanting their expectations met, and then ultimately being really taken and surprised by the full scope of programming.

I don’t know how much you know, but what information do you have about the future of Kowalski? It’s been said that it wants to move to Broadway.
I don’t know how much I can say, but it looks like there’s a future for it. It’s tricky to put a play on Broadway, but it’s looking positive. I’m waiting with as much bated breath as the next person. It’s a special little play.

Why do you think people were so taken with it?
I think what people love most about it is being a fly on the wall during this intimate night with two people that they feel like they know, but are also curious about the things they don’t know.

It also must be so nice to see your husband’s play Prince Faggot taking off the way it is off-Broadway.
I’m so proud of him. And, you know, it’s also thanks to Jeremy, who’s a producer on it. It’s such an incredible play. I knew Jordan as a writer before I knew him as a romantic partner; this play really led me to him, and I think he’s a genius.

New York is such a hard place to crack, and it’s so cool watching this be his New York debut, and it’s a sold-out show every night. The play feels taboo in many ways, and then you leave and you’re like, “That was pure theater.” Like, we got the theater experience, and we also felt the human ethos. It’s not specific to certain people. Everyone can go and walk away with a mirror being reflected back.