In 1961, Dirk Bogarde shocked the movie world when he deigned to play a gay character in the film “Victim,” often lauded as the first British film to deal with the subject of homosexuality sympathetically. Today, the film about gays being blackmailed doesn’t look quite so positive. It essentially blames this kind of extortion on other homosexuals. We learn that the leader of the blackmail ring in “Victim” is gay himself, because he plays classic music at home and his living room décor includes a picture of Michelangelo’s David. Even his female accomplice appears to be a repressed lesbian. She looks tougher than Lotte Lenya in “From Russia With Love.”
There’s a similar confused-message problem regarding the LGBTQ community in Else Went’s new play, “Degenerates,” which had its world premiere Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. At first glance, the play isn’t about gays but rather the incel community. Since I had to look up the word “incel” and could not come up with a more concise definition, here’s what I found in the dictionary: “incel: a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically associated with views that are hostile toward women and men who are sexually active.”
For equally ignorant theatergoers, the lobby at Playwrights Horizons provides a bulletin board full of slang terms used by the incel community. These men hate someone they call a Chad, “any man perceived to be physically attractive enough to find sexual partners without much effort”; and they hate a Stacy, “a woman who projects femininity in a way viewed as explicitly inviting sexual attention, and who is presumed to be unattainable by the ‘average’ man, a female Chad.”
Surprise, surprise. The first act of “Degenerates,” which lasts nearly two hours, is basically a two-hander between Miller (Zachary Desmond), a closeted gay men, and Target (Christopher Dylan White), a closeted trans person who has not yet transitioned. I haven’t put up a spoiler alert here, because, while both characters claim to be straight cis men at the get-go, it doesn’t take Went’s play long to blow their respective covers.
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.
Act two of “Degenerates” lasts only 45 minutes. While the aforementioned sexual encounter propels Target to seek hormone therapy, Miller becomes even more self-loathing. When he returns to the incel chat room, he not only doubles down on his hatred of women; he encourages a guy named Kemp (Tyler Nowell Felix) to commit suicide because he can’t attract women. Miller even goes so far as to put on a suit and tie to take this hate-women movement national. It’s assumed that he often leaves his apartment to become Mr. Incel USA.
As evidenced here, both Desmond and White are very fine actors. White easily makes the transition from fake straight guy to curious gay guy to real trans person. No actor, however, could make the ridiculous transition that Went’s play requires of Desmond.
Who knew that the real problem of rampant misogyny of America is men who just can’t admit they’re queer?
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