Theatre in Review: Degenerates (Playwrights Horizons)

	Christopher Dylan White. Photo: Jackie Abbott

Degenerates is a kind of spelunking expedition, a remarkably nervy one, in which playwright Else Went rappels down into the vast digital cave populated by the sad, seething young men known as incels. Deprived of female companionship, meaningful employment, a sense of purpose, or hope for the future, they spend their time online, raging against feminists, immigrants, and the woke mob, which, they imagine, is coming for their heads. It's not a natively appealing premise, and, initially, one cringes at the idea of spending nearly three hours watching the members of broken brotherhood scratch their spiritual acne. And yet...Degenerates is fascinating, at times startlingly suspenseful. Went has produced a true document of our time, and it's impossible to look away.

Degenerates focuses on three very different examples of the species, connected through online chat. First up is Kemp, on the phone with a suicide hotline, pouring out his shattered heart to an increasingly panicked counselor. "Nobody real cares," he says. "No friends, nobody, nobody knows me, nobody wants to." He adds, "Even like the checkout guy won't look me in the eye, or like, they look through me. Like I'm the inconvenience at the convenience store, y'know?" It doesn't help that Kemp can't be sure the voice on the other end of the line isn't AI, so detached is he from everyday human contact.

This scene plays out in darkness with Kemp, who is armed, barely visible in a sliver of upstage light; one waits tensely, expecting a shot to ring out. For all we know, all of Degenerates will be played at this level of intensity. Instead, the scene ends in a draw, and Went shifts her focus to Russell, a self-appointed guru who has read just enough Camus to be dangerous, repeatedly quoting unidentified "research" to prove his point: Society is a racket, designed to humiliate him and others like him. That he is a virgin at twenty-eight, living with his mother, in a bedroom equipped with a microwave and half-size refrigerator only adds to his authority among the online crowd.

"You're, like, you just say things so clearly," marvels Kemp after one of Russell's rants. "Nobody reads theory anymore," Russell laments, cooking up a hypothesis that a dropping birth rate, combined with a rise in trans youth, explains why nobody he knows can get a date: "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! So if you're such a woke communist, why don't you prioritize the collective and distribute some resources, fuck!"

Oddly, Russell is most connected to Target, a depressed, agoraphobic high-school dropout who, nevertheless, makes a surprisingly good living dressing up as an underage female for online sessions with middle-aged perverts. Is Target straight? Gay? Trans? Don't ask; he doesn't know, but his effeminate manner leads others to make conclusions about him. And, interestingly, Russell is much more titillated by all this than he is willing to admit.

Dropping in on Target, who has selected an accessorized sailor-girl ensemble for the occasion, Russell's visit becomes a sustained exercise in erotic tension. Their mutual desire is evident, their confusion is poignant, and each is slowly going crazy from the uncertainty. I won't say what happens, but the evening ends in a bitter morning after, cueing a furious three-way showdown featuring Kemp, whose re-entry into the story catalyzes a flood of unintended consequences. If Degenerates teaches us anything, it's that the person you know on the Internet can be unrecognizable in real life.

Went has remarkable sympathy for these losers, undone by a rapidly changing world where meaningful social activity is restricted to toxic online discourse. Line for line, the dialogue is hair-raising, whether the guys are discussing a girl gang-banged by a football team and forever after known as "field goal"; complaining about privileged "Ugg boot barbie-dolls" who sleep with men of color "to piss off daddy"; or evaluating the pursuit of "SMV" or "sexual marketplace value." At the same time, disturbing questions are raised about Russell, who romanticizes suicide (at least for others), and whose career takes an alarming turn just before the final blackout.

It can't be easy to bring those Internet swamp creatures to life, but under Emma Rosa Went's confident direction, everyone excels at finding their characters' hidden vulnerabilities and inner conflicts. Arguably, Zachary Desmond is rather too good-looking to play "an ugly-ass fucking five-foot-eight fucking albino fucking troll," but maybe that's the point, Russell's self-hatred acting as a distortion field. The actor navigates his character's hairpin turns with the skill of a slalom skier, holding forth violently about a rotten world, insisting that he is "black-pilled" and free of illusions, yet finding himself distressingly addled with lust for Target. And the way he slowly, painfully gives way to his sexual impulses generates considerable dramatic tension.

Desmond gets enormous assistance from Christopher Dylan White as Target, who has constructed an entirely artificial world for himself -- Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams' set design places him in a pink-toned room filled with manga drawings and plushies -- from which he views the world with considerable irony. (When Serge, a minor character, makes the previously mentioned complaint that white women use men of color like him as a sexual convenience, Target murmurs, "Isn't that basically like, reparations, though?") His seduction of Russell is a series of carefully considered advances and retreats, and when, in the aftermath of their encounter, he suddenly and for the first time in years takes decisive action, one can't help rooting for him to succeed.

As Kemp, Tyler Nowell has less stage time than his co-stars; for reasons of the plot, his physical appearance must be concealed until near the end. But his fury in the first scene is deeply unsettling, and he more than holds his own in the climax. Juan Arturo and Olivia Rose Barresi are sold in smaller roles; the latter, in particular, must create sharply different characters while appearing only on the sound system.

MacAdams' scenic design makes clever use of the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre space, combining Russell and Target's bedrooms for a larger playing area when the occasion calls for it. Jiyoun Chang's lighting effectively deploys darkness in the opener and, in other scenes, carves out the stage fluently. The purple splotches on the walls of Target's bedroom (meant, I guess, to reflect his revolving, multicolored nightlight) are a little distracting, however, but the bulk of her work is fine. Kindall Almond's costumes capture the characters' milieu, and Target's outfits are pretty wild: Check out the "cow-mono" for his bovine-themed appearance online. Angela Baughman's sound design ably carries the weight of lengthy dialogue sequences during which the actors are heard but not seen. S. Katy Tucker's projections make a small, but crucial, contribution to the finale.

I wasn't sold on Initiative, Went's epic-length teen drama, which garnered much praise last season at the Public Theater. But Degenerates is notable for both its ambition and achievement. It has its flaws -- the character of thirtysomething Serge (an "incelder," in the group's lingo) could probably be cut in the interest of a tighter running time, and the voiceover reading of the script's stage directions sometimes irritates -- yet Went is unafraid to shine a light on a world most of us would rather ignore. And to do so would be a terrible mistake. --David Barbour