A Mirror Cracked
For playwright Matthew Gasda, there has been a recent turning of fortunes. His most recent play, Dimes Square, has launched him into minor fame: Vulture reviewed Dimes Square in February and Gasda had a profile of him written in The New York Times at the end of March.
This fact has complicated what one should make of Dimes Square and how to write about and review it. Dimes Square is a play about the literary scene in New York City by a member of that very same scene. Yet, like the mirror off which the characters snort endless lines (financed by exactly what, one must wonder), the distance between the object and its reflection is perilously close.
Dimes Square takes place over several nights in a singular location: the loft of writer Stefan (Max Macdonald). At Stefan’s loft a variety of artistic and media types gather. Relations are tense between all these characters, and the tensions remains high over the course of the play. The play opens with Iris (Anges Enkhtamir)) and Nate (Jordan Lester), a couple who can barely talk to each other. Iris is unbearable. She does not even qualify as a narcissistic artist, just a quotidian self-obsessive who happens to write bloody awful poetry. She punctuates conversation with insecure and tedious lines, at one point she blurts into conversation “I need to lose ten pounds, don’t I?” Nate, a cancelled rockstar, is similarly emotionally incompetent, struggling to address his failing relationship with anything but too late dedications of love. Before they are interrupted, Iris tells him “I am looking for someone else.” She says this not to Nate, but to a bookshelf across the room.
Mike Crumplar, co-host of the podcast Jouissance Vampires and shitposter extraordinary, confused indictment with recognition in his screed against the play. Gasda, in attempting to portray a scene, brings in a set of references familiar to many viewers of the play (especially in the early runs). The play’s cast find themselves drinking fernet and going to Clando (Clandestinos, a bar in the actual Dimes Square, and one you might find Gasda and his actors at), they (we?) are name dropping Joshua Cohen and Sloane Crosby, the former of whom has seen this play at least twice (to the best of my knowledge). The critic Christian Lorentzen plays the bombastic Dave, but really he just plays a somehow more vulgar version of himself. Martin Amis’ daughter Fernanda Amis plays Olivia, a character whose parents are successful writers. Indeed, the version of Dimes Square I saw took place in the home of a well-known novelist, an upgrade from the previous location which was merely the home of one of Gasda’s acquaintances.
This kind of incestuous, self-referential approach leads Crumplar to accuse the play of being insular, by literary scenesters for literary scenesters. Yet, the fact that Gasda knows his subject does not mean he is incapable of being critical of it. Gasda is not merely interested in witty caricatures of his own social life, and to see the play as such is to miss what makes it compelling. Gasda has described the play as comedy, and it is. Yet he has also described the play as deeply pessimistic about the literary scene. What is interesting (and ultimately disappointing) about the play is that it does not quite bridge the gap between comedic and pessimistic. If, as a satire, it is attempting to hold a mirror to its audience, the mirror is a cracked one and the image distorted.
Unlike Crumplar, I take Gasda to mean what he says about his own artwork. And while there are self-indulgent aspects of his play, it is not some baffling and reactionary monument to the underground literary scene. The references to fernet and Clando and Cohen and Catholicism are not the essence of the play. They are mere window dressing. The play is about flawed social climbers and the tragedy of the literary scene. It is comedic because Gasda caricatures his young artistic types. It is tragic because all these characters are stuck in their shittiness. All of the characters are aware that things are unpleasant, that each of the other characters is deeply flawed. Yet nearly all of them remain, feeling a little too close to fame to be willing to walk away. Instead, they lean into the hostility of the situation.
Consider, for example, the female characters. They are all relegated to secondary status by their male counterparts. Their work is of lesser importance, less interest than the work of the boisterous men, the true artists. Faced with this, however, they simply find ways of leading the men on and staying in their peripheral vision. Gasda’s female characters in Dimes Square have been criticized for a certain shallowness, but it is entirely plausible that they appear as shallow because the male characters are not interested in what they have to say when it comes to their art. Rosie (Cassidy Grady) for example, is a visual artist, and when she asks the room to come to her opening, she gets an entirely non-committal “I’ll be there”, but not any interest in what, exactly, she makes and why. Rosie follows up these indifferent promises with “not just because I’m cute, but because I’m talented, ok?” to which she gets a even more indifferent response: “of course.” One could simply walk away from this maltreatment, if one didn’t want to make it big in New York City.
Gasda, however, doesn’t quite pull off a sense of pessimism or tragedy. And this is itself a little tragic, as it is clear that is within Gasda’s powers as a writer to deliver on such a promise.
In the second half of the play, which features Gasda display his full talent as a playwright with seamless dialogue and a real sense of human character, we are introduced to two older writers. The two older writers - Dave and Chris, played by Lorentzen and Bob Laine respectively – explode onto the stage in the opening of the second act and steal the show. Dave’s character especially possesses a room filling bombast. He is verbose, vociferous and vicious. His lines are side splitting, and a fair part of that is due to Lorentzen’s delivery. What steals the show, however, is the pairing of Dave and Chris. It is not their comedy but their humanity that makes them great characters. Geoffrey Mak, in their review of Dimes Square (which is, by far, one of the better reviews of Gasda’s play) for Spike Magazine writes that “For social satire to deliver meaningful critique, it needs a tragic element, which might be figured by a Lear or Don Corleone type, even if in a comic mode. With Dave, a missed opportunity, we don’t get any such moments.” I disagree. Mak has missed seeing Dave and Chris as a pair. Dave and Chris, as the older seen-it-all writers are also tragic as opposed to merely insufferable.
How has Gasda poured more humanity into his middle-aged foils than his painstaking caricatures? It is possible that their age gives Gasda plausibility to slip into the dialogue a throw away line about a dead friend, to make a recent divorce (as opposed to merely a break-up or relationship troubles) and its fallout part of Chris’ character, a character defined by loneliness. At one point Chris says that loneliness is like “a demon that crawls into your asshole and carves out a private hell, you try to shit him out but he clings to your bowls, howling.” It is funny, but it comes from a real place of suffering, is charged with pathos. It is not the mere loneliness of the existential kind: it is something deeper. His divorce is not the image of a shitty relationship coming to an end, but the disintegration of a marriage and the struggle to return, alone, to a world now alien. Compare Chris with Terry (Christian Stevenson) the up-and-coming young filmmaker whose lengthy hugs and forceful come ons dissolve into pathetic impotence. Chris, on the other hand is tragic, pathetic but comprehensible. Chris shows the audience what they are frightened of. Here, briefly, the mirror remains uncracked.
What is stolen in the second act is the coherence of the first. The young artistic types who dominate the first act and appear again in the play’s closing scene are too hateable. Dave and Chris are loathsome, but they are understandable. This is the key to what makes them tragic. Each of the other characters represents a sort of obvious fragment of an artistic personality you might encounter, at a party in the loft or a dorm at art school. Some of them are hanger-ons, hoping to get successful by association – such as Rosie or Ashley (Helena Dryer). The central conflict is between Stefan (whose loft the whole play takes place in) and Terry. Stefan is successful – his novel getting turned into a Netflix show – but he is unliked by his peers and there is a sense he’s only doing it for the fame and the social accolades (sex included). Terry is a filmmaker who is puritanical in his obsession to make good art. He quotes Augustine, he doesn’t fuck, and his art is guided by a concept of aesthetics. Stefan and Terry form a dichotomous pair: Stefan is a seducer, Terry really really needs to get fucking laid. Stefan is an unserious artist. Terry is over invested in his art. Stefan fucks the girl Terry has a crush on, succeeding (sexually) where he has failed. What they have in common is that they are unlikeable and that they are caricatures. The only character who appears in possession of a serious moral consciousness and even – apart from Dave and Chris – serious depth, is Bora (Eunji Lim), Terry’s cinematographer. Terry is in love with her. In the first act, Bora fucks Stefan on the roof. Scandalous. But she reacts with regret, is annoyed by Stefan’s attempts to soothe her anger with more seduction and is aware she has made and is making a mistake. It is the play’s first real human moment. There is no Bora in the second act; Dimes Square’s central dramatic axis cannot sustain her.
Dimes Square is a play about the impossibility of escape. Dave and Chris are cracked mirrors held up to the younger artistic types they hang around with. At the end of the play there is no proper denouement; which gives the audience the sense that everything will go on like this forever, sexual and emotional tensions boiling under the surface until death consumes them all or the lights go up. No one quite has the wherewithal, too entranced by the possibility of fame, to leave the situation. Except Bora. She is literally too well formed a character to participate further in not the literary scene as such, but Gasda’s portrayal of it.
What is exciting about Dimes Square is also what is frustrating about it. Gasda, in a handful of moments, displays the skill and experience of a master playwright. Yet these moments are really only a handful. If it is truly Gasda’s goal to portray the pessimism of the literary scene, he would do well to locate the true source of that pessimism, an exercise which requires robust, multi-dimensional characters. The failures of character picked out from the back of a crowded apartment gesture towards (but do not fully convey) a deep sense of impossible conflict and human tragedy, of those obsessed with greatness enough to become mad, and of those who, committed too long to a certain lifestyle, become stuck. One cannot object that the one-dimensionality is the point, because Gasda can make the same points more compellingly with more robust characters and does so at infrequent moments in this very same play. The great problem of the playwright is the transformation of interiority into exteriority. It is a task Gasda can succeed at it, but not one at which he always does. Gasda’s only way out would be to turn the play’s most famous line – that “we are living through the dumbest time in human history”, which bookends the play – into a motto about the possibility of art and the play itself. Then the point would be that the human condition has deteriorated to such an extent art is impossible and Dimes Square is itself indicitive of this,that they are no longer any human characters to portray at all. A strong position. If Gasda believes this, however, he has another problem. For if that is truly his view he should and would simply walk away, and disappear from the second act of his own career.
Gasda’s pen is deft, but the hand that wields it has yet to find its proper grip. One hopes he has time to develop to the full height of his powers before his newfound success hurtles him into the very lifestyle and personality he so clearly despises.