Theatrical Performancemaxxing at Degenerates

Twelve years ago — when Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured fourteen more in Isla Vista, California after posting a Facebook status proclaiming, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” — his chosen moniker was still a fairly obscure internet term. It had been coined, irony of ironies, by a woman. In 1997, “incel” first appeared in a blog chronicling its author’s dating difficulties — as she put it, her “involuntary celibacy.” By the early 2000s it had been co-opted by men who wielded it as a banner of their misogyny and nihilism. The world, they said, was stacked against them: Women had all the power in the “sexual marketplace.” Their inability to find love and/or sex had nothing to do with the spiritual holes they were digging for themselves and everything to do with a conspiracy of hot, manipulative, withholding “femoids” (I could link to the definition, but you get it) who needed to be brought back in line.

It’s nauseating stuff, and at this point, it’s everywhere — a truly morbid epochal shift that the playwright Else Went has witnessed at closer range than most. Her nerve-tingling new play Degenerates dives deep into these malignant corners of the internet, where she herself has been lurking on forums for years, doing the research and learning the language (“once as obscure … as the droogs’ Nadsat,” she notes in the show’s program, now skin-crawlingly mainstream). The production — getting its premiere at Playwrights Horizons under the direction of Went’s wife and collaborator, Emma Rose Went — still comes with a glossary in the lobby: Depending on which side of the millennium you were born on, it may be a toss-up as to whether your predominant reaction is to feel horror or to feel old. Either way, though, the thrust of the thing is undeniable: Degenerates is a brave, ambitious, sad and sexy beast of a play, imperfect in the way of something gnarly and long-wrestled-with, nevertheless gripping as a piece of performance.

Especially as a piece of acting. The Wents — who wrung my little Saves the Day-loving heart last year with Initiative — are particular wizards when it comes to eliciting fully released, brazenly exhilarating work from actors. And they’re doing it with extraordinary artists who aren’t (yet) big names. Degenerates has a cast of five, all letting rip with vigor and grace, but at its heart, it’s a terrifying duet. It belongs to the two characters whose bedrooms make up the halves of Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s set, effective in both its initial scruffy realism and its eventual expansion toward the abstract. At stage left is Miller (Zachary Desmond, following up his stellar Ivanov with another fearless exploration of tragically fucked-up masculinity); stage right, there’s Target (Christopher Dylan White, quietly wonderful in Initiative and downright heartbreaking here). These men — well, at 18, Target is hardly out of childhood — belong to an online group, headed up by the would-be guru, Miller, who sees it as a place for like minds to gather and dig into the discourse. “The only requirement to be in this group is Temet Nosce, right?” he snaps at a new member, Serge (Juan Arturo, heard in voiceover as the group chats). “Know thyself. We’re not a hugbox for your delusions.”

What Miller expects his online comrades to know about themselves is that there is no hope for them. He’s a hardliner, a “black pill” zealot who thinks he’s found freedom, albeit the bleakest kind, in facing the “truth” — that he’ll never know love or have sex, that the only victory is power in his own carefully cultivated sphere, and that he’ll probably end up killing himself. “I will, when I’m 30. I got two years left,” he tells another member of the group, Kemp (Tyler Nowell Felix), an affection-starved young Black man whose voice we hear in the dark, desperately talking to a suicide helpline at the start of the play. “Kemp, I struggled with this, right at your age” Miller goes on, pitilessly casual. “Asked myself what am I good for, and I realized that what I have to offer is this … talking for real about things we aren’t supposed to talk about. That’s what I’m good for. Talking. And I figure that’s something I can do for guys like you another couple years and if nothing changes, then I’ll step out.” Later on he admits to Target, hollow stars in his eyes, that he knows he can’t and won’t kill anybody else, but he dreams of one day being “name-dropped” by someone who does: “Just to feel, like, part of it.”

If you think that’s heavy, buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy. Degenerates is headed down into the murkiest trenches, the depths where creatures are born without eyes. What’s most striking about the play, and most definitive of it, is the tension it builds between this darkness and the active muscles of both our amusement and our sympathy. Funny things come out of these characters’ mouths, and waves of yearning and sadness, bewilderment and fear, ripple from their bodies so intensely that the space seems perfumed with their emotional pheromones. We start longing for what they long for, whether or not they know it about themselves: for someone to see them, touch them, love them, and for them to become capable of seeing and loving in return.

During the long, expertly crafted erotic build of the play’s first two acts (an intermission comes afterward, so everyone can have a cigarette), I kept thinking of another play at the same theater, somehow already seven years ago. When Playwrights Horizons premiered Will Arbery’s chest-cracking Heroes of the Fourth Turning — which took its own journey into the heart of MAGA darkness, exploring the ventricle inhabited by ultraconservative Catholics — so much of the background noise of the production, both onstage and off, had to do with questions of empathy. Specifically, the theater itself seemed anxious for its New York audiences to know that they weren’t being asked to empathize with these characters. No, no, not that.

Why not, though? So much about how times have changed in the interim is wretched, but not everything: In 2026, the Wents have no qualms about eliciting our human feeling for the men on their stage, nor should they have. They are interested in staging love, desire, and sex (and my god, does Degenerates stage sex — Willow Funkhouser’s intimacy direction lights a match in a room doused in gasoline) because so many of our contemporary cancers come back to bodily shame and suffering. Degenerates is concerned with the traps that are set for the soul when a body is taught to loathe itself, and with what kind of cataclysm might occur if that body and soul are offered a way out of a cave they’ve resigned themselves to for life. “If your identity is predicated on being ‘unlovable,’” Went writes in her playwrights’ note, “what happens to you when you are offered love? What violent reconstruction of the self must take place in order to receive that love? Is there a point of no return, after which love can only be perceived as an existential threat?”

Both Wents are smart as hell, and when Degenerates flickers rather than burns, it does so because the pair veer briefly away from the visceral and toward the intellectual. Some of the play’s stage directions are delivered in a deadpan voiceover by Olivia Rose Barresi (she plays all the women in the piece, mostly unseen but crucial), and though these moments do sometimes offer a touch of illumination, or make for a good laugh at the characters’ expense, they felt, to me, more like the extra dabs of a painter not quite ready to put the brush down. Is the play theatrical enough? Does the audience need to know more about the characters from a perspective outside of their own? The spoken stage directions (which Went’s script does note as optional) often give the sense of a workshop experiment. They don’t necessarily hurt — nor do they turn up the temperature.

What does that is the gorgeous commitment of the actors, especially Felix, Desmond, and White. The true arc of Degenerates charts the unfolding of Miller and Target’s relationship, both online and — eventually, explosively — IRL. Target, who identifies as a “mentalcel” (i.e., celibate for psychological reasons: He’s practically agoraphobic), speaks and moves softly through his pink-lit den of squishies and anime art. White, endlessly mesmerizing, makes him into a kind of Blanche DuBois for the TikTok generation. Where Miller is hardened, he is soft, consciously and at times calculatedly femme. Where Miller clings to his masculinity, despite his hatred for how it manifests, Target is shifting inside his, like an animal long in nightmarish torpor, restless in its den and ready to emerge. With Miller skulking at the threshold, Target leaves the door open. It’s a super-high-voltage dramatic recipe, requiring incredible actorly vulnerability. Together, riding the wave of Else’s hyperfluent dialogue and Emma’s psychologically astute direction, White and Desmond turn it into the hottest thing since Heated Rivalry — if much, much sadder.

If the show’s third act (its shorter post-intermission segment) doesn’t quite stand up to the first two, it’s partly because the team has created such a fusion bomb out of Miller and Target’s plot that it’s tricky to figure out what to do in the wake of its climax. As a writer, Went excels at back-and-forth — the allegro churn of her scenes sweeps us along, engaged and enlivened; where she struggles is in wrapping things up. After almost five hours of brisk, intelligently observed dialogue, Initiative delivered some of its wobbliest work at the finish line, and the same is true here. She hasn’t quite cracked the soliloquy with the same feeling of revelatory force that her characters generate with each other. She also seems to have so much space in her heart for these suffering boys (not a bad thing), that she can’t quite help trying to have her cake and eat it too when it comes to resolving their story.

I’m not worried, though. Degenerates is the type of guts-on-the-table theater that results from years of caring by a group of people who clearly start and end with trust. If it’s got kinks, it needn’t be shamed for them, and it may yet grow and change. It demonstrates what poor, sick, angry Miller — so convinced that he spends his life doing the hard work of really looking at the world — can never understand: Hatred is a cataract. Truly seeing is an act of love.

Degenerates is at Playwrights Horizons through October 18.