Excellent Stagings of Our Basest Selves: DEGENERATES & THE HAIRY APE – Review Roundup

The wife-and-wife team of Else and Emma Rose Went came out swinging last year with Initiative, a five-and-a-half-hour epic tracing the maturation of a high school friend group in the early aughts. Its sweeping scope reminded me of Degrassi: The Next Generation, which through sheer duration and character plurality stands as one of the most realistic depictions of people across time – somewhat paradoxically, considering its melodramatic swings, but also appropriately, due to the mundanity of life it encompasses. Else, the playwright, knit her characters’ online lives, DnD personas and real selves into a rich, sometimes fringed tapestry, which Emma Rose knew how to best display.

Their followup, Degenerates at Playwrights Horizons, is an even more ambitious, incisive and sometimes excoriating exploration of cyber-connected outcasts — in half the time. It centers on a trio of deeply isolated incels on an ongoing, audio-only Discord whose IRL identities complicate their red-pilling. The energy drink-swilling Miller (Zachary Desmond), the most assertive of them, is proof that intelligence and wit are morally moot in the Post-Truth era, his mind warped into knots of self-hate and self-denial. He bulldozes over Kemp (Tyler Nowell Felix), a sensitive Black anime fan at the end of his rope, and secretly (we learn) lusts after Target (Christopher Dylan White), a cosplay streamer blindly groping their way through gender.

Miller’s casual cruelty on the chat is sometimes aided by Target’s perspectives, and the latter’s connection to the group’s ringleader takes on an almost ride-or-die dimension until it’s cam-mode, and they manage to dom Miller into driving the hour and a half over to finally meet. 

Else’s writing is excellent and insightful throughout; I don’t know how one doesn’t develop a permanent migraine wrangling this much online-ness into a single work (echoes of Circle Jerk), let alone such a cohesive and emotionally attuned one. It’s when Miller and Target meet, and Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’ gorgeous scenic design allows their discrete spaces to physically come together, that Emma Rose presents some of the best stage direction today. (The production is aided by Kindall Houston Almond’s costume, Jiyoun Chang’s lighting, and S. Katy Tucker’s video and projection designs.)

Felix turns in a wonderful performance as Kemp, and Juan Arturo, who has gradually built a career out of left-of-center, beguiling work, briefly appears as a Meninist-adjacent cohort member. Olivia Rose Barresi, an Initiative alum, uses her empathy-1000 voice to heartrending effect during the suicide hotline call, performed in the dark, which opens the play.
But this is mostly a showcase for Desmond and White’s pas de deux, and both are remarkable. Desmond’s eyes as they stare at the object of his bewildered affection are lustful and deranged, violent and self-effacting all at once. (A sex scene later on is one of the most charged – and hottest – encounters I’ve seen onstage.) As the slipperier Target, White is a study of embodied etherealness. Both are extremely convincing in roles that are equally reactive and propulsive. Onstage for most of the play’s near-three hour runtime, they only augment or deconstruct their layered portrayals.

As in Initiative, there’s a streak of sentimentality to the playwright’s conclusions, though here it feels more like a touching call to humanity than a way to wrap up loose ends. To its credit (among many), Degenerates is extremely online, extremely today, but tapped into a graceful sense of truth that Went has undoubtedly mined from imagination, insight and experience. After all that onlineness, the Wents know how to ethically unplug.

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Another tale of degeneration is being told at the always-great Irish Rep, which is restaging its 2006 production of The Hairy Ape, Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 war cry against class inhumanity. Ciarán O’Reilly’s production is a stunner, nimbly walking the line between the early career playwright’s expressionism and the realism he would later exemplify. 

In the bowels of a fancy ocean liner, burly and surly Yank (Jon Beavers) considers himself the salt of the earth, mindlessly shoveling coal so that society industrialists like Mildred (Elizabeth Teeter) and her aunt (Joanna Glushak) can twirl their pearls on the lido deck. (Orla Long designed the costumes.)

When the younger social worker decides to take a peep at how the other half lives, she’s horrified by Yank and calls him a “filthy beast.” Once ashore, the now-destabilized stoker finds himself adrift in the early 20th century, trying his luck on Fifth Avenue, a labor meeting presided by a snooty organizer (perfectly played by Adam Petherbridge), and ultimately, the zoo.

Charlie Corcoran’s industrial two-tiered set (inspired by Eugene Lee’s design from 2006) is, perfectly, impressive to us and oppressive to its characters. Especially in scenes set in the ship’s stokehold, lit in smoky neon by Michael Gottlieb, the sense that these men could be crushed at any point is thrilling and palpable. O’Reilly stages much of the action downstage, emphasizing the presentational nature of the text, save for Mildred’s upstage entrance into the hellish stokehold.

That crucial moment is the only one to fall flat for me: the state in which Mildred perceives  Yank might evince her cataclysmic insult, but is hardly crude or unimaginable enough to warrant fainting, and the ridiculousness of that gesture would likely rather cause Yank to scoff than begin an existential tailspin. But then, at least five days into performances, this Yank is not completely convincing. 

Beavers has the brawn (we’ll overlook his hairless torso), and nails the initial scenes in which Yank, utterly secure in his station ("I start something, and the world moves!”), holds court against an older worker’s (John Keating) inkling of consciousness. But Beavers retains that surety throughout, even as Yank’s speech, as written, becomes more babble than bravado. There’s little there to suggest a man losing his grip, much less his place in the world.

It’s a game performance, regardless, as are the rest from the (rather sizable) cast, and O’Reilly presents the material truthfully and memorably enough to overcome flaws–even two which might otherwise sink a staging. The Hairy Ape, at least at Irish Rep, is never out of place.

I shudder to give a “But what if we queered it?” trigger-happy director the idea, but I wonder what a production with homoeroticism turned up a few degrees might look like. (The Id-forward trash collector at the center of João Pedro Rodrigues’ erotic shocker O Fantasma follows a similar trajectory of physical and spiritual degradation – he, too, is ultimately faced with the animal to which he is compared – and the film is not without its class critique.) The tableau on which O’Reilly’s staging opens proposes it could be done; I’ve seen that one before. Something that comments on brotherhood and homosociality, which critiques certain strains of leftism’s alignment of queerness and decadence. I don’t know, maybe I’m just into a righteous brute.

Degenerates is scheduled through November 1, 2026 at Playwrights Horizons on West 42nd Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

The Hairy Ape is scheduled through November 15, 2026 at Irish Rep on West 21st Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.