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Edward Kynaston was the last man to perform women's roles during England's Restoration Period. Prince of Players deals with the crises this idolized star experiences when his enormously -successful career abruptly ends by an edict from Charles II: “No He shall ere again play a She on the British stage.”
Kynaston, 26, had been acting as a boy actor for 20 years in the manner which homeless boys were trained at the time, taken off the streets by older men who instructed them in the highly stylized acting of Restoration comedy and drama. The opera follows Kynaston's fall from stardom, his descent into the dregs of English society, and his struggle to find and claim his true identity.
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