By Sarah Downs
Degenerates, by Else Went, is brilliant – devastatingly, stunningly, painfully brilliant.
This is the kind of work that pins you back in your seat. Went takes male alienation and throws it in a blender. She tackles the issue of male loneliness and ‘incel’ culture – its origin, its heirarchy, its lingo. Through extensive interviews with young men caught up in this world, she has developed a nuanced work of blistering intensity.
Dialogue flies at lightning speed, as inscrutable vocabulary flies through the air. Incel, Volcel, mogging, maxxing, fakecel — It’s like a language immersion course. You just have to go with it. Director Emma Rosa Went harnesses the energy beautifully, so the pace does not outrun the narrative, which builds incrementally to a startling apotheosis. The principals in this narrative, Target and Miller, maintain a superhuman level of tension for an extended period of time. When the director occasionally lowered the temperature to give us a moment to breathe, you could feel the audience relax its shoulders en masse. Mine were up around my ears most of the time. Between the occasional bouts of nervous laughter, you could hear a pin drop.
The show opens with Kemp (an engaging, earnest Tyler Nowell Felix) phoning a suicide hotline. Out of the dramatic semi darkness, we hear a frightened, bewildered man trying to make his world make sense. When we eventually meet him in IRL, Kemp is so sweet you just want to give him a hug. His desperate call establishes the framework of the show, and indeed how high the stakes are with this epidemic of isolation. After a dispirited Kemp hangs up the phone, the lights come up on a cleverly designed split-level set – Miller’s home on one side, Target’s on the other. No two spaces could be more dissimilar. Miller’s home office is bleak and barren; Target’s bedroom blossoms with pink everything, from anime posters to plushies.
The action of the play takes place partly in voice over and partly onstage. In the heated online chat the four main characters, Miller, Target, Kemp and Serge are engaged in as the lights come up, each man participates remotely, Kemp and Serge from offstage. Miller runs this incel group, ranting about the ever unattainable opportunity to sleep with a woman, and what b–tches they are (let us count the ways.) The angry traffic in bitterness, punching downward, bullying men into bullying women – and each other — because, patriarchy. It was this internal aggression that startled me the most. The jockeying for position, the meanness. These men are so, so lonely. But there’s a marketplace for anything, including pain. The Andrew Tate’s at the top of the bully chain make bank out of every teardrop they inspire. COVID isolation was the best thing that ever happened to their business model.
As the online discussion among the four men proceeds, Kemp and Serge drop off the call, leaving Target and Miller to sidle up to each other emotionally, which requires incredible trust on the part of the actors, and a huge leap of faith for their characters. What ensues is dynamite.
Christopher Dylan White as Target is an effortless chameleon, a soft spoken powerhouse of an actor across whose face emotions ripple with gentle ferocity, some so fleeting you almost don’t register them. Intelligent, determined and confused, Target is a self described ‘femboy’ agoraphobic looking for something to structure his identity. He’s pulled in all directions; it seems that everyone in his life is a taker.
His perceived opposite, the bombastic, Miller (an electric Zachary Desmond) is in many ways the more delicate of the two. He’s a car crash, a volcano, heat seeking missile in search of a target. Miller has absorbed the incel message completely, spewing bitter anti-female rhetoric and twisted evolutionary biology “facts” to make everything women’s fault (because of course it is), and women need to be dominated (because of course they do) in order for the world order to right itself. Desmond commands in this role. He devours the stage, but his stillness is as powerful as his bravado.
Serge (an engaging Juan Arturo) appears in voice over exclusively. Nevertheless he creates a strong impression as a complete individual. Olivia Rose Barresi as Stacy makes a brief appearance, in which she easily conveys the conflicted annoyance women feel when a guy insists on interrupting her.
In her program notes Else Went discusses why she took on this subject, asking “What if you give up the fight against and commit to the fight for? Can you love bigger than their hate?” She dares us to feel compassion, and she succeeds. These guys say some seriously hateful stuff about women, yet in the safety of my theater seat I listened with increasingly sympathetic ears. It is an impressive, multi-layered piece of writing and an absolute must-see.
(NOTE: There is some explicit sexual intimacy (no nudity) so don’t bring the kids.)
Degenerates, written by Else Went, directed by Emma Rosa Went. With Juan Arturo, Olivia Rose Barresi, Zachary W. Desmond, Tyler Nowell Felix ,and Christopher Dylan White.
Creative team: Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams (Scenic Design), Kindall Houston Almond (Costume Design), Jiyoun Chang (Lighting Design), Angela Baughman (Sound Design), S. Katy Tucker (Video + Projection Design), Sarah Lunnie (Dramaturg), Willow Funkhouser (Intimacy Coordinator).
At Playwright’s Horizons ( 416 W. 42nd St) through October 18th. So hurry and get your tickets HERE or at www.playwrightshorizons.org. Run time is: Act I-II 100 min. + Intermission 15 min. + Act III 45 min.
