Target Margin Theater Unveils 2025-2026 Season - DEGENERATE ART NOW!

Target Margin Theater has revealed details for Degenerate Art Now!, the Obie award-winning company's 2025-2026 season.

As the NEA begins to support work that expresses our country's “heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President” and forces around us begin to draw lines around what art is acceptable and what is not, Target Margin remains steadfast in making the OTHER kind of art. Art that is uncertain, challenging, subversive, deviant, slippery. Art for “the strange, the slant, the queer.” Art that must be excluded, deported, kept out of sight, or simply incinerated. The Nazis called it DEGENERATE. But this is not 1937 Berlin. This is New York, now.

The 2025-2026 season will be anchored by This Is Real, a new theatrical production inspired by the work of Jean Genet. Created by the company, and directed by David Herskovits, this new work brings the transgressive spirit of Genet to life for America in 2026. This Is Real features Genet's obsessions: power, sex, and performance. It will premiere in March 2026 at The Doxsee, Target Margin's home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

“Art supported by the going system, supports that system,” says Herskovits. “Regimes favor art that is easy. Easy to recognize. Easy to understand. Regimes favor art that supports them. Not me; my question is, ‘What other art are we called to make today? What other artistic values can we make flourish here, in our own Garden?' The work of Jean Genet has inspired me for decades. Genet was a thief, drifter, prostitute, who wrote from prison; his work affronted convention and challenged audiences to question their own lives. Above all, Genet was committed to representing the outsiders of our world, the counterculture, misfits, losers, and criminals. These are Genet's heroes. This Is Real asks our audience to consider these degenerates anew. What is the beauty and wisdom of the outsider? Aren't we, all of us, outsiders in our own ways?”

Target Margin is pleased to announce the return of the Target Margin Laboratory, a three-week performance festival of new work that explores the theme of Degenerate Art Now. Running September 18 – October 5, The Degenerate Lab features Faggot/Terrorist, a theatrical work by Target Margin's Associate Artistic Director Adam M. Kassim inspired by the work of David Wojnarowicz; director Malena Dayen interprets Valerie Solanas' underground classic Up Your Ass; and TMT Associate Artist Anthony Vaughn Merchant leads Next Up, a piece inspired by and featuring new voices lead by the counterculture of punk. Each artist creates their own reflection, each work expands the range of meaningful work today, each piece is more DEGENERATE than the last!

The 2025-2026 season will also include the latest edition of the TMT Institute, a year-long fellowship that provides five artists space, material resources, and a $2,000 stipend to challenge themselves and their art-making practice. Fellows will be announced in October.

Throughout the year, Target Margin will continue to lift up rising artists, local artists, and established artists. As part of that work, Target Margin artists will once again work with local Sunset Park elementary students again to create an original theatrical work. Young Artist productions will be performed at the Doxsee theater in December,  2025 and May 2026.