Imagine a bedroom with plush toys overcrowding a twin bed and posters of flirty anime girls on the wall. Two people who aren’t supposed to be having sex are having sex. It all happens in a series of flashes, with the harsh, industrial sounds of SOPHIE’s 2015 song “MSMSMSM” matching the disorientation of the moment. It’s hot, it’s uncomfortable, it’s ravenously human. One hundred forty people look on.
This two-and-a-half-minute scene-within-a-scene happens 90 minutes into Degenerates, the latest play from playwright-director duo (and married couple) Else and Emma Rosa Went, showing at New York’s Playwrights Horizons through Nov. 1. The production’s debut comes less than a year after the Wents’ Initiative, a five-hour epic that nabbed a Drama Desk Special Award and was lauded by critics as one of the best plays of 2025.
While that project delved into the loves and losses of a high school set of friends, Degenerates hones in on a different group of young people: members of a Discord channel who “hang” and “share ideas” about their involuntary celibacy. As hateful rhetoric and violent ideation became mainstream online and poured over into our political landscape, Else, who is trans, was compelled to make a play examining the consequences of masculine toxicity. Equal parts unflinching and merciful, the result imagines what happens when people united by their perceived undesirability find themselves desired (and desiring).
In the midst of the Degenerates previews, I sat down with Else and Emma Rosa to discuss inceldom, sex and tension onstage, and Mary Oliver.
Warning: This conversation contains spoilers!
Else, could you tell me how this play started?
Else Went: During the pandemic, I was in a lot of online spaces, and in a lot of trans spaces, in particular, there were young people who were coming to terms with gender dysphoria and having mental health issues. There were a lot of suicidal young people during that time. I spent a decent amount of nights when I couldn’t sleep telling people that it would be okay. Not everybody in those spaces did survive their crises, and it led to this exploration of the overlap of different online communities where suicidality is not taken seriously and is part of the culture.
I’ve seen a lot of trans young people posting online and then never posting online again after their last post. The play wants to address that issue, take it seriously, and offer an image of a way forward and out of that mental space in those online spaces.
How did you go from trans spaces online to incel communities and 4chan chatrooms?
Else: There is a lot of overlap between incels and depressed, self-hating trans people on 4chan—people who are starting to have gender dysphoria or some relationship to gender or queerness that is coming from a toxic masculine online space.
There’s a lot of linguistic overlap. Incels will be like, “Oh, I don’t have enough of a jaw.” They do phrenology. Trans people in those spaces do a lot of phrenology as well, but it’s sort of the opposite: “I have too much of a jaw, I’ll never pass. I shouldn’t transition because I’m going to be hideous and I’ll be hate crime-d.” The mental health space intersects in a really similar way. I don’t think the actual issues are the same, but the expressions of misery are really similar.
One of the characters in the play says that the one thing he’s good for is talking “for real” about the things we aren’t supposed to talk about. That made me think about what you do with your scripts and your plays: You’re not afraid to go there. Can you talk a bit more about why you are interested in the taboo?
Else: My fascination is always driven by a desire to fully understand the psychology behind things that people would rather not look at. Theater is a great place to explore that because—while it isn’t a safe space, exactly—it is a place where you can collide things, with real bodies, safely. The art form invites the capacity to look deeper and more dangerously at a thing because of this container. My desire is to make people feel the things they would usually turn away from if they encountered them in any other space.
Emma Rosa Went: Not enough theater takes advantage of the fact of presence and the fact that the medium is bodies and proximity. You’re in the room together and you can’t get out and that is the thing.
Have there been any surprises so far in audiences’ reactions to that tension?
Else: A lot of people, I think, have never experienced sitting in a room with sex like this onstage. Younger people in particular are very nervous and don’t know how to sit with it and don’t know how to bear witness to it.
Emma Rosa: I think audiences don’t totally know that they have permission to be erotically engaged with a work.
Do you think that squeamishness is a generational thing?
Emma Rosa: I think it has to do with the internet, social media, and growing up in a culture of being surveilled by their peers constantly. People’s trepidation around expressing or even experiencing sexuality has to do with being perceived to be doing it wrong, and the internalization of that surveillance. Young people no longer feel like making mistakes is part of experience, and that’s a huge loss. Authentic desire, authentic sexuality, has nothing to do with political correctness.
When we were doing the first public-facing development of this play at the Public [Theater] in 2024, I was teaching undergraduate at Marymount at the time, and a bunch of my students, who were mostly 20-year-old women, came to see it. They were feeling like, Wait, I could fix him, about one of the characters and that was destabilizing for them, coming from the framework that social media has demanded of us that you must be rightly aligned, you must have the right opinions, you must be attracted to the right things, you must be free of dark impulses. Then you come see a play like Degenerates, and you’re feeling, in a simplistic sense, that this character is a bad person. Yet you are turned on by his contradictory lack of self-knowledge, by his movement toward desire and power, and even by the way he hates himself.
No one is perfectly aligned in what their intellectual framework wants, and what, as Mary Oliver would say, the soft animal of their body wants. Those things are mostly not in alignment.
Who needs to see this play the most?
Else: Trans women. They’re also my favorite audience members so far because there’s a deeper level of comprehension of the humor and the cruelty and the places where they intersect, which I think is appreciable only by people who have had embodied engagement with the harm that gender causes. This is a play about masculinity, and this is a play about how masculinity has injured every man in it and every person in it.
Trans women largely don’t get plays that deal with our complexity and admit the full viciousness and violence of what it is to become a person in opposition to everything that society wants. There is a gap in the cultural quilt of the stories that we get. Most trans narratives are simple and restorative and palliative, and say, “It’s safe to be in the world, you can exist,” or they are straightforward tragedies in which we say society needs to change. I hope that what [Degenerates] offers is that it shows this is how it is, and it is that hard, and it does hurt that much, and it is that worth it.
Emma Rosa: We talk about Degenerates as an incel play, but, really, it’s a trans coming out story. Something that’s kind of magical about how the play works is that it may require a series of small mystical acts of grace in order to arrive at your final self-actualized form.
Else Went: The play affords certain miracles in order to make the full gesture, and I think that it’s successful in that. Obviously, in real life, it takes a lot longer, and you know the miracle might not come, but tiny acts of grace do occur.
Christopher [Dylan White], who plays Target, went to a small midwestern city and walked around dressed as a woman to have that experience of being a person who’s visibly gender-nonconforming in a city where that isn’t such a normative thing. They experienced a lot of trepidation and concern and awareness that they were being looked at, but, also, somebody tapped them on the shoulder and said, “Hey, I really like your dress.” Tiny acts of grace like that do occur.
This is the thing: A lot of people who know they’re trans think that they’re not going to be able to exist that way safely and comfortably in the world, so they never try. The play says, “Just try.”
Emma Rosa: One of the play’s theses is that no theory about yourself that you form in isolation can be right. You can’t sit in your room and decide who you are. You have to go be a person and risk being in relationship with other bodies to know.
Target says, “I want to treat you like a man, so you know what it’s like, and I want you to treat me so I can know.” One of the play’s largest ideas is that everything real is different than how we imagine it, and that includes the self. The fear ruling the incel space is “I can’t experience myself as a failure if I don’t try.”
Why did you choose to end the play on one of the characters’ descent into the incel community?
Else: Because society has not addressed or confronted the fact that we abandon men into this pit of antisocial hatred. People like this exist, and they are shaping other young minds. We can’t forget this violent rhetoric that is growing and accumulating its own community, and that community wants to move. I just saw a clip of Clavicular talking about how Merriam-Webster has added looksmaxxing to the dictionary. There is now a word in the dictionary that is directly related to an ideology of misogyny, hatred, white supremacy, and you can’t ignore it. It is a threat.
Emma Rosa: When Miller walks back out at the very end of Act Three, wearing a suit and looking more functional than he ever has, we know that he’s dead inside. He had a self, and he killed it because he couldn’t live with it. That’s what makes him a dangerous political actor. He has nothing to lose now, and he will kill you. There’s the political scale of that, and simultaneously the personal tragedy and loss. There was a kid in there, and we were there when he was holding a stuffy and laughing on Target’s bed. We watched him have sex, and then we watched the fear come in, and he wouldn’t let the fear get taken away.
You’ve said that there are certain poems that have been very important to the play process. To close, can you share one of the poems?
Emma Rosa: There’s this Mary Oliver poem. It goes,
“The lonely
stand in the dark corners
of their hearts.
I have seen them
In cities,
and in my own neighborhood,
nor could I touch them
with the magic
that they crave
to be unbroken.
Then, I myself,
lonely,
Said hello to
good fortune.
Someone
came along
and lingered
and little by little
became everything
that makes the difference.
Oh, I wish such good luck
to everyone.
How beautiful it is
to be unbroken.”
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