Sixty years ago, The Beatles wondered about “all the lonely people, where do they all come from.” Today’s Eleanor Rigbys are less likely to be spinsterish women picking up rice from church weddings than young men eking out quiet lives in their bedrooms playing video games or watching anime or connecting with other humans only via online chat forums. Else Went’s remarkable and remarkably intense new drama Degenerates is a deep dive into modern male alienation — the so-called incel culture of voluntary celibates who feel the world has been stacked against average Joes in favor of looks-maxxed Chads and women who hold all the cards in the sexual/romantic marketplace.
The show opens in darkness, with a young Black man named Kemp (Tyler Nowell Felix) calling into a suicide prevention hotline and, after a longer-than-expected period on hold (complete with jarringly bouncy hold music), connecting with a counselor (Olivia Rose Barresi) who tries to talk him down from using the gun he says is right in front of him. This being 2026, she also must convince him that she’s not AI. “Even like the checkout guy won’t look me in the eye,” he laments with genuine anguish, his body coming briefly into view in a sliver of light between walls on the set. “Like I’m the inconvenience at the convenience store, y’know?” It’s a startling, harrowing, and emotionally charged opening in which Kemp explains that he’s not able to open up to anybody in his life — not his parents, not his co-workers, not his former schoolmates — except for “some guys online.”
Those guys online turn out to be a group chat on Discord for like-minded men who find themselves shut out of the general culture. The lights go up on two bedroom cells (designed by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams and lit by Jiyoun Chang) where two members are engaging with the voices of Kemp and a handful of others. Miller (Zachary Desmond) is the chatty leader of the discussion, dropping pearls of antifeminist ideology, dubiously sourced statistics, and outraged aggrievement between puffs on a cigarette in the basement bedroom of his parents’ house. Target (Christopher Dylan White) is a soft-spoken 18-year-old femboy holed up in a room lined with anime posters, plushies, Christmas lights and a pink globe lamp that casts pastel dots around the walls; he also occasionally pushes back at Miller’s more incendiary proclamations.
Miller is notably unsympathetic to Kemp’s plight, even encouraging him to consider suicide as a legitimate option (and one that he claims he might exercise himself when he turns 30 in two years). He’s a fascinating bundle of bravado and boyishness, palpable yearning for intimacy coupled with simultaneous insecurity and anxiety. Desmond, in his Off Broadway debut, captures the character’s contradictions with compelling charisma and vulnerability that he’s all too quick to tamp down.
Eventually, he agrees to an IRL meeting with Target, who opens the door dressed up as one of the character’s buxom anime icons. In a mesmerizingly intimate scene, the two seem to open up as they flirt with the idea of flirting with each other. We learn that Target hasn’t left his apartment in months, eking out a living performing sex acts on camera for strangers — one of whom wants to finance his transition into a woman, an idea that holds appeal in part the mysterious donor has promised regular payments of $8,000 per month.
There’s a sweetness to Target’s confusion and insecurity, as when he notes that posting a selfie on 4chan got him trolled by transgender commenters convinced that he was a weak-chinned trans boy. “All these women, or people who want to be, or think they whatever, and they’re jealous of me? Nobody’s jealous of me.” White, who made a strong impression in Went’s 2025 play Initiative, imbues Target with a quiet intensity that’s ultimately reassuring despite all the on-the-surface tension.
Miller, on the other hand, is not so lucky. He has so girded himself in his self-produced ideology of isolation that when he’s given the opportunity to “ascend” from incel status, he first revels in the initial sexual release and then almost immediately shuts down. In the third act, as Target and Kemp begin to chart a path through their predicaments, Miller seems to regard his compatriots’ growth as personal rejection. He wallows in his isolation, and begins to transform himself into an influencer of the sort that he once publicly denounced (“Tucker, Shapiro, Rogan, all the top guys just prey on us, like our loneliness is a commodity they’re mining”).
Else Went has a real knack for bringing audiences inside the headspace of outcasts and rejects; a voiceover (by Barresi) intoning stage directions and character moods reinforces her stylized approach to storytelling. Her first play, the five-hour-plus epic Initiative, followed turn-of-the-millennium high schoolers playing Dungeons & Dragons to work through their feelings about themselves and life’s big questions. Even at three hours (in not exactly comfortable wooden seats at Playwrights Horizons), Degenerates never drags during its similarly immersive dive into contemporary youth culture. That’s due not only to the writing but also to Emma Rose Went’s thoughtful, well-paced direction.
There’s an empathy to the Wents’ methods that allows them to explore some of the darkest corners of humanity without succumbing to nihilism. (Miller emerges as too much of a narcissist to use the gun seen in the first act on himself or anybody else.) Degenerates transforms ripped-from-the-headlines sociology into incisive character study, allowing us to understand the experiences of many young men who find themselves stuck in life for one reason or another. Or many reasons all at once. This is engrossing, essential theater that should not be missed. ★★★★★
DEGENERATES
Playwrights Horizons, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through October 18 for $75 to $129