There is something almost suspiciously appropriate about three new Off-Broadway plays arriving at the same time to examine online extremism, conspiracy culture and digitally mediated loneliness. Theater, after all, is an art of bodies sharing a room. Its newest subjects are people who have lost the ability—or sometimes the desire—to live outside the screen.
TDF has identified ANON at MCC Theater, Degenerates at Playwrights Horizons and Fish at WP Theater as a striking concentration of new plays concerned with online extremism and isolation. The coincidence is less important than the shared premise. These works do not treat the internet as scenery, a projection surface or a convenient source of contemporary slang. They treat it as a social environment.
That distinction matters. The internet’s most consequential function is no longer simply distributing information. It is organizing emotional explanation. It tells people not only what to believe, but how to understand their humiliation, grief, fear, anger and loneliness. It offers a story before it offers the truth, and often belonging before it offers either.
Three forms of digital abandonment
In Anne Washburn’s ANON, directed by Anne Kauffman and running at MCC through November 1, a suburban mother is drawn into QAnon-style conspiracy culture. The play’s unsettling insight is that extremism does not arrive from a separate realm inhabited by obvious monsters. It enters the kitchen, the neighborhood and the family conversation. MCC’s production materials place the play within that ordinary domestic world, while the theater’s accompanying public programming has explicitly invited discussion of the QAnon era and its consequences.
Degenerates, written by Else Went and directed by Emma Rosa Went, examines young men finding identity inside incel culture. The production runs at Playwrights Horizons through November 1, and a New York Stage Review account describes characters speaking through phones, video calls and direct messages from separate bedrooms and basements. The play’s physical design places those rooms beside one another: different interiors, similar forms of solitude.
Fish, written by Melis Aker and directed by Tatiana Pandiani, moves back to London in 2016. A seventeen-year-old girl investigating her brother’s disappearance uses the internet to test a theory, only to find herself pulled toward identities, propaganda and danger she does not understand. WP Theater has extended the production through November 1. Its period setting is significant: the present internet did not suddenly become toxic. It became ordinary first.
These plays address different subcultures—conspiracy believers, incels and terrorist propagandists—but they share a dramatic suspicion. The problem is not merely that people encounter false information online. It is that the network gives emotional shape to experiences that once lacked an audience. A grievance can become a worldview. A private shame can become a political identity. A lonely person can discover that his pain has a vocabulary, a hierarchy and a community waiting for him.
The old theater of persuasion
There is nothing entirely new about theater’s interest in ideological contagion. Drama has long examined religious hysteria, fascism, advertising, television and the psychology of crowds. What has changed is the speed and intimacy of persuasion. The contemporary believer does not always join a mass gathering. He may sit alone in a bedroom, receiving a customized stream of explanations that confirms both his uniqueness and his membership.
This is why the plays should not be mistaken for sociological research. They can make emotional patterns visible, but they cannot tell us how widespread those patterns are, how people move between online communities or which interventions work. Their evidence is dramatic rather than statistical. Their achievement, if they have one, is to give human scale to a process that platforms tend to render as anonymous engagement.
ANON appears to understand that conspiracy culture is powerful partly because it is epic. It offers a hidden plot, a villainous architecture and the promise of an approaching reckoning. Degenerates approaches misogynist rhetoric as a kind of emotional anesthesia: language that numbs pain while making recovery less imaginable. Fish treats online horror as something absorbed casually, almost recreationally, until the distance between curiosity and consequence disappears.
In each case, the internet supplies not only content but atmosphere. The characters are living inside a weather system of fear, grievance and suspicion.
The stage as counter-environment
The theater’s formal response is more revealing than its subject matter. Audiences gather in the same room to watch characters who avoid direct contact. Online communication is fragmented, asynchronous and personalized; theater is embodied, sequential and temporary. A stage cannot compete with the internet at speed, scale or customization. It can offer duration, physical consequence and the awkward presence of other people.
That may be why these plays are interested in bodies. The screen can turn a person into a username, a post or an ideological category. Theater puts the person back into a room, where voice has weight, silence takes time and another human being cannot be muted without the audience also acknowledging the act of leaving.
But this counter-environment has its own danger. Theater audiences are often unusually prepared to reject the beliefs being portrayed. A production can make extremism emotionally comprehensible while allowing spectators to leave congratulating themselves for having understood it. The result is a form of aesthetic domestication: a dangerous culture becomes fascinating, articulate and perhaps even redeemable, but only within the safe boundaries of a ticketed evening.
The central question is therefore not whether these plays condemn online extremism. They do. It is whether they can explain its appeal without confusing explanation with absolution—and whether they can represent victims, targets and damaged communities as fully as they represent the people who have entered the digital underworld.
What theater can and cannot restore
The internet has made isolation visible without necessarily reducing it. People can now find communities organized around their most private grievances, but those communities may intensify the grievance rather than relieve it. The older institutions of belonging—family, neighborhood, religion, civic life—were never as inclusive or reliable as memory sometimes suggests. Yet their decline has left a vacancy that platforms are very willing to fill.
The theater cannot restore that lost civic world by depicting its online ruins. Nor can a play solve radicalization, loneliness or political mythmaking. It can, however, make certain forms of isolation harder to dismiss as abstractions. It can remind an audience that the person inside a destructive ideology is still a person, while insisting that personhood does not erase responsibility or the damage done to others.
That is a modest achievement, though not a negligible one. The danger is not only that audiences will fail to understand online extremism. It is that they will understand it beautifully and then mistake the experience of recognition for political action.
The most valuable of these productions will leave the audience with less confidence, not more: less confidence that extremists are incomprehensible, less confidence that empathy settles the matter, and less confidence that the theater itself is outside the culture it is examining.
The stage cannot outpace the algorithmic underworld. It can do something stranger. It can require us to remain in the room with people whose explanations of suffering are repellent, persuasive and human. Whether audiences leave with greater understanding—or merely the reassuring sensation of having spent two and a half hours among people who are worse than themselves—will be the real measure of the experiment.
