Did You Know These Shows Were Inspired By Social Media Posts?

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This time, the reader question was: How often are plays inspired by social media posts?

Right now there are not one but two off-Broadway shows that everyone is buzzing about… with provocative titles… that were originally inspired by social media posts. 

Prince Faggot and Slam Frank are two of the most talked-about productions of the season so far—and both were initially inspired by tweets on the platform now known as X. 

Prince Faggot, written by Brandon Tannahill and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, made its off-Broadway premiere at Playwrights Horizons in the spring of 2025. The play’s initial run was sold out and extended until August. Prince Faggot then made the move to Studio Seaview, formerly the home of Second Stage Theater on 43rd Street, starting performances in September and running through December. 

Prince Faggot takes on the topics of power, sexuality, and politics, through the lens of a story about Prince George of Cambridge. In reality, George, son of William, Prince of Wales and Kate Middleton, is currently 12 years old. At the age of five, in 2017, the Prince was at the center of a tweetstorm. Photos of the child inspired people on social media to hypothesize about his sexuality, calling him a gay icon.

In the play, the queer cast members make this experience personal, each dissecting a childhood photo of their own and going into detail about how the image indicated their sexual identity at an early age. The idea of a prince who is in line for the throne being LGBTQ+ is explored in this stylized piece that uses that twitter storm as a jumping off point. The show is a hypothetical dramatization of Prince George as a young adult pursuing relationships and navigating how his sexuality intersects with his role as a monarch.

Like Prince Faggot, Slam Frank also originated with a series of tweets. In 2022, a tweet posed the question: “Did Anne Frank ever acknowledge her white privilege?” Andrew Fox saw this post, which was part of the racial discourse and reckoning of the time, and it galvanized him to create Slam Frank, which comments on the way that identity politics have consumed and impacted art-making during the 2020s. Slam Frank specifically tackles how Jewish artists have come into the conversation about diversity and representation, via a satirical plot about a theatre company that attempts to make Anne Frank’s story racially diverse and inclusively genderqueer. The show is written by Fox and Joel Sinensky, and directed by Sam LaFrage. It is currently playing to audiences with their jaws dropped at Asylum NYC.

Social media has taken over public communication and discourse in this century. From the popularity of social networking sites of the early 2000s like MySpace and Facebook to the prevalence of TikTok and Instagram in the current global community, social media has become one of the main ways that human beings gather (virtually, of course) and disseminate information. Thus it follows that while stories from the radio or newspaper—or even that passed from human to human via direct forms of contact like the phone— might have inspired earlier works, communication on social platforms is a point of inspiration for artists of the 21st century. 

In our current social media landscape, shock value certainly has currency. Both Prince Faggot and Slam Frank reflect this sensibility, starting with their titles and extending to their premises and execution. They are shows for the social media generation, reflecting on stage the conversations and tones we all see on our mobile devices as we scroll our feeds before the show starts.  

Of course, social media has been a major element at play in many shows of the 21st century, not just Prince Faggot and Slam Frank. What makes these two buzzed-about shows distinctive is the way that they transformed specific real-life public conversations that occurred on social media into full stage pieces exploring the subjects discussed. As a reference point,  shows with social media as a main influence include but are not limited to Dear Evan Hansen, Emojiland, Eureka Day, Job, and Octet. 

In the 2017 Tony Award-winning Best Musical Dear Evan Hansen, the title character tells a lie that blows up his high school and home life, largely because of the way that social media takes the lie and runs with it. Digital communication means that a teenager making a speech can be broadcast to countless people instantly and all over the world—a fact new to our 21st century world that is at the crux of Dear Evan Hansen’s plot. Evan Hansen’s speech goes viral just like the tweets about Prince George and Anne Frank both went viral; while Dear Evan Hansen dramatizes the fallout of a fictional speech, Prince Faggot and Slam Frank each use viral posts as a point of inspiration for new stories. 

Emojiland has a much sillier premise—in some ways. The 2000 off-Broadway musical comedy is about the end of the world—as seen through the eyes of emojis about to experience a software update. The show’s characters include Princess, Nerd Face, and Pile of Poo—all figures that humans utilize on social media on a daily basis; the show capitalizes on our collective smartphone addiction to tell an allegorical story. Job is an intense play that hit Broadway in 2024. One of the characters in the two hander is a moderator of online content, meaning that she has to review and delete if necessary violent and deeply unsettling photos and videos posted on the internet. The danger of social media to mental health is one aspect of the thriller. A Broadway play with a much lighter tone, still tackling vital topics about the internet, was Eureka Day in 2024. In Eureka Day, there is an outbreak of mumps at a private elementary school due to anti-vaccination beliefs among some families; the issue comes to a head in an online chat storm that precisely and hilariously skewers the nature of conversation on these platforms. Meanwhile, Octet explores smartphone addiction—in particular, the overall isolation brought on by social media culture and its impact on our society. The 2019 a cappella musical follows a support group for internet addicts with various problems. While these four shows are far from the only ones to incorporate social media in a significant way, they are four of the most significant productions with major social media plot elements from the past decade. 

A new off-off-Broadway musical inspired by a viral meme was just announced for a January start at The Players Theatre; The Opening is a new theatre piece about a chess player who allegedly cheated via a vibrating butt plug. Like Prince Faggot and Slam Frank, The Opening credits a social media platform post as responsible for its inception. Also like the two off-Broadway shows currently playing, it capitalizes on shock value. 

Another thing that both Prince Faggot and Slam Frank have in common is their detractors. Since each show was announced, there have been people upset about their existence. Some are offended by the idea of magnifying speculation about the sexuality of a child who is in the public eye due to his birth and others are outraged that the diary of Anne Frank is being capitalized on in a comedic manner. Both shows have been hotly discussed this season—both in person and, of course, online.