The reviews are in for Degenerates, the new play by Else Went and her second with her wife, the director Emma Rosa Went, after last season’s five-hour Initiative. It is set among a handful of self-described incels who meet on a Discord server, and it opened the Playwrights Horizons season at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater with Zachary Desmond as the group’s embittered ringleader, Christopher Dylan White as the reclusive young man he finally meets in person, and Tyler Nowell Felix, Juan Arturo and Olivia Rose Barresi completing the cast. The critics largely take the play as seriously as the Wents take their characters, and the acting, above all the long central encounter between Desmond and White, is the part nobody disputes. Where they part company is over length, a third act several find too tidy, and whether the play’s empathy for these men asks too much of its audience.
The verdict: fifteen reviews so far. Five carry a score and ten do not, and among the four that score out of five the average is 4.3 out of 5: fives from Culture Sauce and The Front Row Center, four from 1 Minute Critic and three from New York Stage Review, with New York Notebook adding four stars of its own, and The New York Times names it a Critic’s Pick. The performances are the closest thing to a consensus. Christopher Dylan White and Zachary Desmond are singled out in almost every notice, TheWrap included, and Tyler Nowell Felix is rarely far behind. The arguments are about the writing. New York Theater, New York Notebook, 1 Minute Critic and Lighting & Sound America all find the evening too long, Vulture and Exeunt NYC think the third act wraps things up too neatly, Talkin’ Broadway finds it leaning on a coincidence, and TheWrap takes issue with what the play ends up saying about its men.
What are critics saying about Degenerates?
The New York Times
"‘Degenerates’ Unmasks the Longing Disguised as Hate"
Reviewer: Helen Shaw
“The long-ebbing chill of the prologue sets the temperature, not to mention the life-or-death stakes, and it takes a long time for the show to warm back up. But somehow the play is, despite its horrors, a comedy. Punctuating the welter of male voices, an offstage woman (Olivia Rose Barresi) reads stage directions with droll disdain. “Miller burns his mouth on his Hot Pocket,” the voice says. (Watching Miller try and fail to eat is one of the play’s forms of sport.)”
Vulture
“Theatrical Performancemaxxing at Degenerates”
Reviewer: Sara Holdren
“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.”
TheaterMania
“Degenerates, Else Went’s Drama About All the Lonely Incels”
Reviewer: Zachary Stewart
“She once again works with her spouse, director Emma Rosa Went, who last season helmed her five-hour millennial epic, Initiative. Their collaboration has quickly become one of the most exciting theatrical partnerships in New York, wedding fearless curiosity to sharp-eyed storytelling that doesn’t flinch from a challenge. The major one in Degenerates is that so much of the action takes place online, limiting the potential for stage action, a hurdle the Wents overcome through gripping performances and clever design.”
TheWrap
“Virgin Misogynists Get the Play They Deserve”
Reviewer: Robert Hofler
“Miller and Target, after knowing each other well online in the incel community, finally meet in person. Both rarely leave their respective abodes, but when they connect in person, no time is wasted getting down to some very graphic gay sex. Miller was a virgin, Target intimates having been raped — but both characters are way too proficient at what they do in bed, as well as on the floor, to make either claim unbelievable. Unfortunately, the playwright and director Emma Rosa Went apparently expect us to take Miller and Target at their word.”
Culture Sauce
“‘Degenerates’ brilliantly infiltrates the guts of incel culture”
Reviewer: Thom Geier · 5 out of 5
“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 prologue 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.”
The Front Row Center
Reviewer: Sarah Downs · 5 out of 5
“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.”
1 Minute Critic
“Love looks like a threat to the self-declared unlovable of ‘Degenerates’”
Reviewer: Matthew Wexler · 4 out of 5
“Went has a way of going down the rabbit hole and bringing everyone with her. Last year, her five-hour play Initiative earned raves for its nuanced portrayal of a group of high school friends, including a real-time game of Dungeons & Dragons. What Degenerates lacks in comparative length, it compensates for in a meticulous, if occasionally stagnant, unpacking of a rageful generation whose moral compass is trying to catch up with technology.”
New York Notebook
“A primer on the world of incels verges on overkill”
Reviewer: Sandy MacDonald · four stars
“Thanks to Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s bifurcated set, audiences will become intimately acquainted with two chatline habitués. Miller (Zachary Desmond, brilliant), inhabiting the bro-basic cube to the left, serves as the group’s virulent ringleader. Providing counterpoint in a cushy cube to the right, the manga-obsessed recluse “Target” (Christopher Dylan White) is pretty clearly tuned to the wrong channel. He’s lonely, yes, but perhaps not a seeker of the right stripe.”
New York Stage Review
“Degenerates: All the Lonely People”
Reviewer: Michael Sommers · 3 out of 5
“The exceptionally vivid performances delivered by Desmond, White and Felix, as well as those provided by Juan Arturo and Olivia Rose Barresi as other folk, are directed with considerable sensitivity by Emma Rosa Went to suggest their inner longings. Despite their frequently nasty talk – the playwright churns up some surprisingly funny invective – the characters are not degenerates so much as pathetic in their self-loathing loneliness.”
Talkin’ Broadway
Reviewer: Marc Miller
“I liked Initiative, but at least an hour and a half of it was devoted to the acting out of a Dungeons & Dragons-like game, which for some of us elders in the audience might as well have been a foreign language. No such mystery enfolds Degenerates, which focuses on the incel community, those lonely and often vituperative young men who band together online and dis everyone who isn't them, which is to say, anyone who's getting some. Their growing army hasn't been dramatized much onstage; Degenerates makes a very good case for doing so.”
Lighting & Sound America
Reviewer: David Barbour
“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.”
Read David Barbour’s full review at Lighting & Sound America
New York Theatre Guide
“Love and loneliness have entered the chat”
Reviewer: Caroline Cao
“In an achievement for a 100-minute first half, Degenerates compellingly slow-burns toward Target and Miller’s baring of bodies and souls. Target’s soft-spoken seduction and Miller’s attraction are awkward, taut, and filled with psychosexual tension. Ostensibly, sex might fulfill them: Miller can reach his masculine destiny, and Target can seal his self-imposed destiny as a subjugated girl (as Miller puts it, “Can’t get a girlfriend? Become the girlfriend”). However, their consummation unlocks a Pandora’s box of self-reckoning — punctuated by the set pieces quaking apart in heartbreak.”
Exeunt NYC
“A trip down the rabbit hole of the manosphere brings both empathy and frustration”
Reviewer: Loren Noveck
“It doesn’t help that the transition becomes actualized in act 3, where the Wents tie things up with too tidy a bow, as the three main characters move forward on trajectories much simpler than the painful messiness of the earlier action. Miller, disavows Target to broaden his platform in the online male rights world; Target steps fully into gender transition; and Kemp tries to make a connection in the real world, with one gentle failure and one success. The ease with which both Kemp and Target are able to break the spell of poisonous ideas makes it seem like those ideologies are easily countered by a single offline encounter.”
New York Theater
Reviewer: Jonathan Mandell
“The stagecraft, and the elongated scenes of casual conversation, suggest that the creative team is committed to verisimilitude at the expense of clarity and audience comfort. It’s not common to talk about audience comfort. A certain kind of prestige theater production seems deliberately indifferent to it; the longer we have to sit through and the more we have to sift through the theatrical equivalent of cinema verité, the greater the acclaim. (Annie Baker’s “The Flick” and David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic” come to mind.)”
Washington Square News
“‘Degenerates’ dives deep into the manosphere”
Reviewer: Chantal Mann
“Despite all the vitriol they spew, Miller and Target’s relationship starts as strangely endearing. Desmond and White play their characters without judgment, and Else Went’s writing treats them with touching tenderness. They don’t feel like caricatures of evil men, but two lonely young people who have been so desperate for connection for so long that they’ve convinced themselves that they are truly unlovable. You find yourself rooting for the pair to find their way out of their desolation and open up their hearts to each other, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when they fall apart.”
For more of what the New York critics have been saying this week, read our roundups for School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, How Shakespeare Saved My Life at The Public Theater and Arias with a Twist at HERE Arts Center.
Degenerates runs at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, through October 18, 2026. The running time is about 2 hours 40 minutes, including an intermission. Production photos by Jackie Abbott.
