“Degenerates” Is Funny, Pervy, and Startling
Else Went’s electrifying new play, “Degenerates,” at Playwrights Horizons, begins in darkness, with the audience eavesdropping on an anguished call to a suicide hotline. The caller, a trembling, panicky young man named Kemp, insists, between bouts of paranoia—is the operator an A.I.?—that he is fated to be alone, unloved, and unlovable. He is a “half person” in society’s eyes. Kemp can’t share his feelings with his parents, who don’t get how much the world has changed. When he “tried IRL,” by confiding in his co-workers, they froze him out. “People hate seeing men in pain,” he says, bitterly. There’s one exception in his life, he acknowledges, with a despairing laugh: “Yeah, I know a guy. He’s gonna love hearing about this.”
This sequence is the first in a set of shrewd structural gambits, a forced baptism in empathy for an incel—the sort of man who is generally portrayed in art as a loser at best, a monster at worst. But if that heartrending hotline exchange suggests that Went’s play—which is skillfully directed by her spouse, Emma Rosa Went—will go easy on the troubled denizens of the manosphere, the mood shifts when the lights come up to show Miller, the secret sharer Kemp mentioned. The self-appointed leader of a Discord support group, Miller (Zachary Desmond, crackling with venom) is mid-rant, spitting bile about “this little nine-year-old cunt” from his elementary school—a fourth-grade girl he calls a “heifer” and a “femoid.” Chiming in with support on an audio feed are his followers: Kemp, twenty-one, the sad sack from the hotline; Target, a fey, agoraphobic eighteen-year-old anime fan who earns a living online as a niche streamer; and Serge, thirty-three, a combative newcomer. The stage is split in two: on the left, outlined in pale green, is Miller’s spartan lair, with a microwave, a Smiths poster, and dirty laundry. On the right, bathed in neon pink, is Target’s place, a blitzkrieg of manga imagery, the walls covered in posters of girl warriors with marshmallow bosoms.
What follows is a delirious, unpredictable theatrical experience, which begins as anthropology and then unveils itself as something more provocative: an exploration of the possibilities and limits of human intimacy. For a while, Miller’s followers shoot the shit with their nastily charismatic guru, sharing their experiences of rejection and sparring over racist jabs disguised as jokes (then justified as science). They share links to the profiles of women who rejected them, then rate their looks. There’s a particularly frightening moment when Miller finds his “heifer” classmate online and discovers that she’s become a post-top-surgery queer progressive with short hair and a social-media display adorned with Ukrainian flags and Black Lives Matter slogans. “Have at her,” he sneers. “Full-blown fucking bluehair uwu enby feminist freak.” The dialogue is often like this, a riotous, disorienting, and sometimes horrifying thicket of the cryptic argot—“hypergamy,” “mewing”—that is the Esperanto of the terminally online. When Miller dismissed one man as “MGTOW” (pronounced “mig-tau”), I nodded, sagely. Oh, yes, the shorthand for “men going their own way,” the red-pilled cadre who reject women, as opposed to incels (“involuntary celibates”), who feel rejected by women, not to mention P.U.A.s, tradcons, groypers, lobsters, and looksmaxxers—the rainbow flag of virtual misogyny.
When the meeting ends, only Miller and Target remain in the chat. And then something odd happens: Target turns on his computer’s camera. The exchange that ensues is funny, pervy, and startling—and suddenly the play begins to glide along a fresh, unusual path, one that tracks the bond between these two people, who have very different but equally complex relationships with femininity. In the second act, the two rooms merge, so that Miller and Target can inhabit the same space. It’s a date, kind of, or maybe just a hangout, but either way it’s an interaction with a galvanic, destabilizing kick—an attempt to build a bridge between two people who are barely able to make eye contact. At one point, a character screams in terror, “You weren’t streaming, were you?” It’s a reasonable fear: if these two share anything, it’s the knowledge that an invisible digital audience is always watching, thirsty for some catastrophic screwup.
Which brings us to the other audience—the one watching the show. There are theatregoers who might feel resistant to seeing a play so saturated with ugly ideas, let alone one that’s a little sympathetic to the men who hold them. It’s not difficult to imagine a version of “Degenerates” that takes a more palatable, but less interesting, approach to this material, providing a hand-wringing primer on the toxicity of online misogyny—something more like the television show “Adolescence,” which, however elegantly filmed, felt engineered to work as an after-school special for worried parents. In pop culture, incels tend to be portrayed in one of two ways: as a cautionary tale or as a joke. They’re a subject for edutainment, not artistic exploration.
Went—an alum of the Public Theatre’s emerging-playwrights program whose work includes “An Oxford Man,” about the first trans man to get a phalloplasty, and “Initiative,” about Dungeons & Dragons gamers—has significantly stranger fish to fry. A mischievous visionary inspired by slicing verbal stylists such as Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward, Went creates work that dwells on the mutability of human character, depicting sexuality as a liberating wormhole into new identities. In “Degenerates,” she finds provocative parallels between two sets of online isolates who seemed like they should be natural enemies: woman-hating incels and the cadre of mentally fragile, gender-dysphoric teens who came of age in the pandemic. Both groups, she suggests, share a few qualities—a conviction that their bodies are unacceptable, a craving for transformation, a susceptibility to exploitation, and a fascination with cracking the code of gender performance. Perhaps because Went herself is trans, she is refreshingly unconstrained by rules of positive representation, enabling her to create messy, dynamic characters such as Target—a frail figure, played sensitively by Christopher Dylan White, who spends most of the first act curled up like a snail inside a manga-print hoodie, cocooned by stuffies. A screened-out digital native, Target can be icy, brittle, and narcissistic, not to mention alarmingly skilled at manipulation. Yet he’s also capable of real insight and vulnerability. Like any teen-ager, he’s a work in progress, struggling to construct an authentic self inside a universe of deepfakes.
Much of “Degenerates” pops because of its propulsive repartee, which replicates the twisted energy of a chat room at 3 a.m.: “These feminazis are on Bluesky like ‘if you can’t get a girl, you’re the problem’—like no, bitch, supply is dwindling and I’m the starving class!” But the show is most challenging when the characters get physical, in primal encounters that bear a resemblance to both clowning and pornography. There’s an incendiary wildness to such moments—a willingness to make the audience uncomfortable, to force us into shock, disgust, or arousal—that puts “Degenerates” in conversation with recent plays about female-adolescent rage (“John Proctor Is the Villain,” “Camping,” “Dad Don’t Read This,” “Indian Princesses”) in which no single character is reduced to a mouthpiece for right-think, allowing grottiness and chaos to reign.
I don’t want to spoil the third and final act of “Degenerates,” but I found it satisfying, cathartic, funny, and—as Miller might put it—a bit “hope-pilled.” Went’s canniest gift is her ability to pick the lock of even the cruellest psychic trap, imagining liberation in a way that doesn’t require purity or absolute decency. In a note that opens the script, she writes, “Not all love is selfless; not all mercy is earned.” It’s a Wildean aphorism with a touch of the Biblical, the perfect length for a meme. ♦