Men and Medusa: Aidan Close Steps Into the Underbelly of the Internet in “Incels and Other Myths”
Wearing a tunic and faced with a sword-armed Frankie, Avery fights his way through the online video game “Oracle” to save his mother, Elaine. But before Avery confronts his once-friend and mentor, he goes through the ordeal of a lifetime, falling from mere superbrained social outcast to a young man unwittingly embedded in incel culture.
Incel: a term for people who deem themselves to be “involuntarily celibate” due to social awkwardness or physical attractiveness (but, at least to the general public, now more synonymous with men who believe themselves unattractive due to their physical attributes and interests rather than the fact that they are often violently misogynistic). Although the history of this word cannot be distilled into a single, neat sentence, colloquially, that is what it can be boiled down to. Ally Sass’s play Incels and Other Myths takes a dive into the world of incels, exploring the complications and sociopolitical dynamics of this community. Described by Sass as “a mother and son’s epic journey into the complex digital landscape of gender, power, and mythology,” Incels examines the factors that shape Avery and Elaine’s realities, and how someone could get caught in the riptide of a dangerous but albeit attractive-to-some community of outcasts.
Aidan Close, who played Avery during the recent Incels run at New York Theater Festival as well as the original production of the play in Boston in 2021, went on a deep dive into incel culture when he was first studying up for the role. “That night I stayed up until 4am,” he tells me, laughing a little self-derisively. “It was maybe the worst night of my life.” In a single night, Close perused online threads, podcasts, and even an incel dictionary, later emerging from this rabbit hole with the rising sun and a too-real understanding of the world of his character and the surrounding play. Coming from a place of vulnerability (“I was very lonely and grappling with my own masculinity and relationship to that loneliness,” he says — a feeling, I noted, which was all too familiar during the play’s first run, after over a year into the pandemic), Close was able to see himself in Avery. He realized that “incel-dom comes from a seed that everyone has. It grows in different ways, and the thing about the incel community is that it waters it and feeds it with a lot of sexism, insecurity, binary thinking, and fear.”
Armed with this knowledge, Close ventured into the world of Incels, and performed a successful run of the play in Boston alongside his fellow cast, under the direction of Erica Terpening-Romeo. But when it came time to revisit the character for the play’s New York festival run, he found himself at odds with his original process. He was no longer in a place of direct relatability to Avery, and instead had to find a new way in. “It wasn’t that I had to re-investigate a dark side of myself, it was: now I have to investigate a new side of myself that scared me in the present,” Close says. “I had to find a new aspect of Avery that scared me, that resonated on a true level. Because audiences are really good at sniffing out bullshit.”
Audiences might have good drivel-detectors, but there was very little of it to be seen on stage. Between the heart Close brought to the story and the truth in Allison Blaize’s (Elaine) performance and character, there was no doubt in my mind, at least, of the power of this story. Despite the premise of the play, which would lead readers and viewers alike to expect Avery to fall into the clutches of inceldom, it’s really Elaine who ends up in too deep. It’s a profoundly effective bait-and-switch, one which serves to combat the impressions surrounding who and what incels are. Sass expertly weaves the politics and multifaceted nature of Greek mythology into modern perceptions and mythologies surrounding incel culture. As Elaine tells the students at the all-girls school she teaches at, Medusa was just a woman before she became a mythic monster, and even then, her monstrous qualities were borne out of pain that was inflicted on her by those in power. The Minotaur was left to fend for itself in an impossible maze — is it really any wonder why it grew up jaded and defensive? There’s a level of maturity, understanding, and respect for those at the fringes of society that Incels portrays; it’s the kind of understanding that leads to genuine thought and conversation about its subject matter, rather than falling into the easy trap of plot points for shock factor.
Coming out of this successful second run, Close hopes that audiences left with “questions or uncomfortable answers.” Avery, he notes, “grows up, and it’s not inevitable. It’s not like the show ends with some triumphant sex scene, he doesn’t make it out of inceldom, but he makes it out of inceldom. He makes it out of the binary thinking that makes that possible.” Ultimately a show about a contrasting ensemble of people all dealing with impossible feelings and fears, all blindly but desperately grasping for human connection, Close hopes for honest conversation: “I hope there’s hope and there’s an honest look at these kernels of frustration, of desire, and the words with which we categorize that desire, especially on the internet.” (Especially on the internet.) ⬥
