DEGENERATES World Premiere to be Presented at Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons will present the world premiere of Else Went's Degenerates, directed by Emma Rosa Went, September 16 – October 11. This world premiere play brings audiences into a group forged around their own perceived unlovability. Between the closed worlds of bedrooms and the digital silos they open onto, painfully intimate conversations unfold, as Degenerates burrows into the extreme side of the epidemic of male loneliness.

In their obscure corner of the internet, Degenerates' characters offer each other proof that the game is rigged against men: it was over before it began, they will never be loved, better just to lay down and rot. When an unexpected relationship begins to form, the consequences of these boys' fatalism are made abundantly clear. Degenerates offers a telescopic, darkly funny view of one insular community, formed on the bedrock of shared and infinite miseries.

Else Went's own research into the incel “community”—though Went challenges this word here, given its mutually destructive nature—was spurred by the surge of suicidal ideation she witnessed online during the pandemic. Went spent time during that period trying to talk people away from that edge, but became curious, as a writer, about spaces where individuals were doing the opposite.  She perceived one consistency across the incel condition—otherwise marked by ideological incoherence and “unshaped rage and pure emotionality”: it is constructed, with its own intricate language, to maintain self-loathing without interruption or contradiction, to the extent that the possibility of being loved becomes a threat to one's sense of self.