The Last Days of Downtown - A New Play by Matthew Gasda
Brooklyn Center for Theater Research

"The Last Days of Downtown" stages the terminal phase of New York's creative class through Terry, a filmmaker's, 40th birthday party (a gathering that becomes an inadvertent wake for artistic ambition itself). Gasda's seven scenes trace how the anxiety of influence has mutated into the anxiety of irrelevance, where artists perform their own authenticity aware that performance has replaced the art.

Terry, a filmmaker screening movies for "five hundred parasocial weirdos," embodies the contemporary artist's predicament: possessed by the dream of greatness but trapped in an economy of micro-celebrity and gossip. His friends—writers, scene fixtures, crypto speculators—orbit around absent centers of meaning, quoting Cervantes and Leonard Cohen while destroying each other through casual betrayals and calculated cruelty. The play's genius lies in showing how cultural exhaustion manifests not as silence but as compulsive eloquence—everyone talks brilliantly around the 2020's unique form of spiritual suffering.

This is Gasda's most achieved, comprehensive, theatrical work: combining his novelist's psychological acuity with a dramatist's sense of scenic architecture. The party structure allows him to explore how community dissolves into networked individualism, how the desire for recognition poisons the very art it's meant to serve. We are all desperate to be identified correctly, to find someone who knows how to make us nourishing rather than toxic.

In the spring of 2021, as institutional theaters were still finding their post-pandemic footing, Matthew Gasda fell into a downtown social scene forming on the eastern edge of Chinatown, by the juncture of Canal and Division Streets. Substack What he witnessed would inspire a body of work that has made him what Vulture dubbed "Dramatist of the Scene" Office Magazine—a theatrical chronicler of a self-chronicling generation.

Before Dimes Square, Gasda spent years developing his craft in near-anonymity. His first play, Messages, was staged as a workshop production by Gorilla Rep NYC in 2015. His second play Denmark debuted at Access Theater in June 2016. Ardor The Play His adaptation of The Bacchae was performed in Central Park in July 2016. Ardor The Play The pandemic forced a creative pivot: after about six months of re-evaluation and re-writing, Gasda began organizing rehearsals in parks, putting on a short play set around a park blanket in Fort Greene, later in a backyard in Bushwick in the middle of winter, in the snow, and eventually, indoors. Grandfatherclocksblog

A few months later he unveiled Winter Journey, a drama loosely based on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, in a chilly backyard in Bushwick. Then came Quartet, a comedy about two couples who swap partners, which he put on in a TriBeCa apartment. He staged Ardor, about friends who gather for a weekend in the country, in a loft in Greenpoint. Grandfatherclocksblog The audience for Quartet (2021) was packed, and the performance generated buzz around its young playwright. BOMB Magazine

After workshopping and developing the play, Dimes Square previewed on February 11th, 2022. Following its first sold-out run at Ty's Loft in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the play was revived for an extended run in Soho. Maximilian Joseph Ma The production operated entirely outside institutional support—Gasda and his repertoire of trained and nonprofessional actors were building their own theater community that included supporters who offered space. BOMB Magazine

Set in a Chinatown loft, Dimes Square chronicles the petty backstabbing among a group of egotistic artists and media industry types. It's filled with references to local haunts like the bar Clandestino and the Metrograph theater. Substack In the play, as in real life, a bunch of artists, writers, influencers, and nepo babies gather in a Chinatown loft to talk about converting to Catholicism, hating sex, loving cocaine, and living through "the dumbest time in human history." Dazed

At a time when large, institutional theatres were still finding their post-pandemic footing, this brutal, hilarious portrait of New York City scenesters drew in new and diverse audiences by distilling the zeitgeist of our strange new era—a bitter cocktail of dirtbag politics, casual depravity, and pitiless ambition. Amazon

The critical response was immediate. Spike called it: "As a comedy of manners, it's as good as it gets… It's a generational snapshot—someone had to do it, and at least it's someone who knows how to write." Barnes & Noble Vulture noted that "Gasda has a deft, humorous touch and a rare talent for steering large numbers of characters." Amazon Dappled Things argued: "What preserves Dimes Square from triviality (and, more damningly, from being boring) and elevates it to excellence is that, though this may be how things are, this is not how they should be." Dappled Things

Afters (2023), billed as a sequel to Dimes Square, premiered in April at Gasda's new permanent space, The Brooklyn Center for Theater Research. BOMB Magazine

Gasda wanted to address the cultural phenomenon of niche fame and micro-celebrity that Dimes Square explored. He had a unique opportunity to reflect on the play's themes because he had experienced those themes himself after writing the original—he became one of those people who had a work that everyone was talking about for a time. BOMB Magazine

Only four of the ten characters in the first play appear in the second. Much of the drama that happened between the characters in the first play has passed into legend: the artists who were successful in that play have mostly faded from view; artistic rivalries turned out to be trivial. Really, the art wasn't that good, and the artists weren't that serious. BOMB Magazine

The theatrical model was Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2. In Dimes, the character Dave, played by Christian Lorentzen, is a kind of Falstaff; Rosie, played by Cassidy Grady, is a Prince Hal figure. By the time of Afters, set in a not-too-distant future, you see a possibility in which Rosie wisens up and leaves the world of the "scene" behind to take her role as an artist more seriously—like how Prince Hal leaves behind the world of taverns to become a rather serious and effective king. BOMB Magazine

Afters revolves around Rosie and her sister, a social media manager visiting from Chicago. Rosie lives in an apartment paid for by her boyfriend's crypto money, and besides selling a few paintings to microcelebrities, she is active in the scene. We find the sisters after a night out, hosting a group of self-obsessed, self-loathing guys and coquette-core girlies, waiting for the cocaine to arrive. Substack

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