Degenerates
Playwright Else Went has a runaway hit on her hands: Degenerates, now at Playwrights Horizons. With two extensions and an almost sold-out run, this show seems to have hit a nerve with a particular demographic. The play involves an online community of ‘incel’ men whose visceral hatred of women is commingled with a self-loathing which in turn can turn into online radicalization.
Opening in complete darkness for the first 15 minutes, we hear a desperate young man calling a suicide hotline. The caller, named Kemp, is deeply disturbed, says he has a gun on a table in front of him. The hotline assistant attempts to calm him down. The next few moments are filled with tension and dread. Amazingly the moment passes and Kemp hangs up suddenly. This sets the edgy but unfulfilled tone of the show for the next three hours.
The light eventually comes up onto scenic designer Mikiko Suzuki MacADAMS brilliant set, which showcases isolation: two cubicle-styled spaces separated by a void. In the left-side space, Miller (Zachary Desmond), a frenetic Gen Zer, is on an online chatroom. He appears to be the ringleader of the conversation as he spews his vitriolic, fast-paced dialogue to the various callers. In the other cubicle, an anime-postered and stuffed-animal-filled room, is 19 year old Target (Christopher Dylan White), a stereotypically effeminate, self-described “mentalcel” who has not left their apartment in almost a year.
This long, strange set-up leads into the next surreal segment. On a webcam that Target has set up to lure older men into paying to watch him, with option of erotic content, Miller tunes in and turns on to Target’s enigmatic allure, responding to the, no joke, cow outfit and makeup that Target applies with tender care for his clients. After many back-and-forth conversations, Miller sets forth to actually meet Target in person at their apartment.
In a slyly inventive scene change, the two individual living spaces glide together to form a complete set for the first and only time, just as Miller and Target meet IRL. These two damaged souls seek to connect, and flirt with a psychosexually heightened tension that is palatable, and at the same time cringeworthy.
That Target wears a pair of fake breasts with a lace teddy for this meeting raises the level of demented visuals. In an increasingly awkward, fumbled series of moments, the scene turns to a graphic simulated sexual coupling. After a quiet, unsettling moment afterwards Miller, who has convinced Target to pursue sex reassignment surgery, stumbles out, more confused than before. Add in the return of the suicidal hotline caller from the dark opening, his inability to date a woman, and a brief epilogue that showcases Miller as a successful manosphere misogyny guru, the structure of Degenerates disintegrates.
Much of the play is explicit; the audience easily can feel like a fly on the wall. It seems the playwright wants to posit all this visual and verbal miasma, basically moral decay, and leave it up to the viewer to discern what they make of these sad, lonely people. The play at times is excruciatingly unpleasant but is buoyed up with impeccably astute and galvanizing acting by the two leads. Their commitment to their characters is tragically on point and realistic.
If in the mood to uncover rot and malaise that lies hidden from view, this eye-opening drama is your ticket.
Degenerates
At Playwrights Horizons
416 W. 42nd St.
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, one intermission
Through November 1, 2026
