Collected Agenda with Matthew Gasda

Guest Edit #15

Drawing on the diary as a medium of both confessional interiority and visceral engagement with the physical world - guest edits ask creative people to share What They Did and What You Should Do.

Introducing Matthew Gasda (The Sleepers) (Novalis) (Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research)

INTRODUCTION

Matthew Gasda is a New York City based playwright and author. He is known for Doomers, Zoomers, Dimes Square, and Uncle Vanya on Huron Street, among numerous other plays and novels - casting a gaze on the interpersonal claustrophobia of social dynamics, and playing out the nuances of a cultural moment in the context of a living room or conversation. The Gasda plays I’ve seen tend to depict contained scenes; a few nights in Dimes Square, a family’s winter return to a beach house, a boardroom in decay. The subtlety of plot crescendos into a quiet sense of desperation and even mania, with the characters ultimately delivering parallel or sometimes overlapping monologues that leaves the audience with a strong sense of persona, and leaves the other characters with the malaise of misunderstanding and being misunderstood. The unconventional settings in which Gasda often presents his plays confounds these feelings - the audience is almost right there. The lack of an escape hatch becomes palpable.

I mean this in a positive sense. Gasda’s theatre creates a profound sense of unease without voyeurism, and even the most despicable of characters are treated with a kind of thoughtful integrity not often awarded in criticism or satire. Matthew Gasda was recently named in The Cult 100 - “actively shaping and changing our culture in real time.”

Matthew Gasda’s new novel The Sleepers was published with Arcade on May 6.

In Gasda’s Writer’s Diary, and in many of his plays, there is an underlying sense of an ethos or of corresponding characters that, hyper aware of the failings of our unromantic age, are actively, albeit often unsuccessfully, taking action to seek some prevailing sense of romance in the void. It is interesting, then, to see Gasda write characters in The Sleepers who are, fundamentally, in what I perceive as the author’s view of the world, fallen. The Sleepers is contextualized in the barren landscapes of Los Angeles and Williamsburg. There are few things less romantic than that. San Francisco, Berlin, the Lower East Side and the cast of strivers and grifters and Doomers and Zoomers that lurk in their respective board rooms and living rooms may fall on the swords of their own ego and fallacy, but at least having conceptualized the vacancy, they are desperate to escape it.

With The Sleepers, Gasda writes a different milieu. The year is somewhere around 2015, the place is Greenpoint. The novel oscillates between the perspective of Akari; late twenties, bisexual, cinematographer, kind of mean, her sister Mariko; early thirties, failed actress, Brooklynite, beautiful, aging, works at restaurant, and Dan; leftist-professor Mariko describes him as “basically philistine”, self satisfied, also aging. Later in the novel, the perspective of Eliza is introduced; early twenties, former student of Dan, also beautiful, gained a bit of weight, insecure, Dan initiates an affair with her after she late-night messages him on Facebook.

With many of Gasda’s plays, there is a sense of absorption within a specific hyper-present moment, and there is an accompanying energy that keeps the existential depression somewhat at bay. Conversations escalate and interrupt and the actors pace and talk and enter and exit with momentum. There is grandiosity and self absorption and dread and sometimes someone who is humorously unaware of their own fallacy, but there is little resignation. If a character is bored, they are self consciously so. Perhaps this is the nature of the novel versus play, but The Sleepers really enters the weeds.

There is a natural distaste elicited by experiencing someone whose only desire is pleasure. Porn brained, dopamine brained, an artist for the title alone ruled by id and sometimes ego - the novel opens with a slow descent. On stage, the characters in Dimes Square or Doomers seem frustratingly unaware of the meaning in their own language, or of what comes after the night the audience becomes a fly on the wall to. There is some glamour to watching a night-in-the-life-of-an-egomaniac, however. Egomaniac may be a harsh word. In the case of Dimes Square, there is glamor in watching a night in the life of the selfish spoiled youth.

The pace of The Sleepers, if nothing else, renders any shred of glamor null. We watch for a few years, not a few hours. When the night ends, the pleasure-seekers are standing in front of the fridge. “No matter how healthy the snack was, it wasn’t a good idea to eat at night. You should resist the urge; eating late could disrupt your metabolism,” Mariko muses. Mid-attempt to resuscitate their sexless relationship, Dan goes to the bathroom. He emerges, announcing that he took a shit. At the end of the novel, Mariko is with someone new, with a child, the life does not seem so bad (despite a prior tragedy that has left the whole cast of characters reeling). Akari watches on mercilessly. “My sister’s getting fat,” she whispers to her girlfriend. “She really is though. You should have seen her like when she was your age.

The dual bodily decay and vanity of the characters is, perhaps at times, a bit on the nose, but it personifies them, and the pious-hedonist arrested-development avocado-bowl tinder-date world in which they occupy well. Your only value was pleasure, and now you’re fading into an unremarkable middle age. It is strikingly, viscerally, depressing.

Erin Lake Smith writes, in an earlier review of The Sleepers, on the Verso-Books Early-Me-Too era of Brooklyn that the novel describes - “People understandably want to memory-hole it because it is embarrassing, but I'd say the larger problem is that is simply not romantic.”

I would argue that an account of this world, written by an author who has been described as a writer of new Romanticism, is very compelling. (an aside - I recommend reading Gasda’s piece A Few Doubts About Neo-Romanticism in Wisdom of Crowds).

The Sleepers opens with Akari in Brooklyn, fresh off the plane from Los Angeles, scrolling on dating apps and texting her ex and ordering agave at the restaurant, equal parts horrified by the stilted, corporate, technology-ruled, and listless world she drifts through, as she is unable to resist the habits it breeds. Her arrival at her older sister's house suggests an uneasy foreshadowing. Sexless relationships and suburban bliss. Akari is young and pretty with a good creative career, yes, but her success seems mostly to be a product of happenstance and decent striving habits. None of these sleepers seem to be ruled by much of anything, aside from occasional bursts of dread, or sometimes lust.

This is not to say that the novel is mocking, or in no way sympathetic. A book like this runs the risk of becoming cartoonish, but this is not Gasda’s style, and while The Sleeper occasionally flirts with this line, it does not cross it.

My one gripe, in reading The Sleepers, was that I was unsure with whom my sympathies were supposed to lie. The opening chapters painted the sisters as protagonists, sometimes listless and sometimes cruel but ultimately not without redemption. Victims of circumstance, really. Dan, on the other hand, struck me as initially irredeemable. “Dan had a dopey charm” and flirts with Akari despite seeming “increasingly permanent” with Mariko. He has recently published a “deft” and “over-analyzed” n+1 article on “the death of the interface.” He was “self-consciously a feminist, so self-consciously tolerant, sensitive, concerned — even if he was still essentially a mansplainer.” The later chapters, however, center Dan’s perspectives, letting the sisters (particularly Akari) drift into the background. Dan is not exactly redeemed, but his self-immolation is painstakingly charted. These chapters are also compelling. A bit abrupt, when we begin with Akari, but a few false starts in a novel that deals in world building and decay, is not necessarily a flaw. I would have liked to read a bit more about Akari, but after finishing the novel, I did conclude that its ambiguity, towards which I found initial reservations, remained is one of its central strengths.

Matthew Gasda’s week, celebrating the publication of The Sleepers, certainly does not parallel the sterilized horror of the world he builds. Here is his Collected Agenda:

WHAT MATTHEW GASDA DID

Thursday, May 1st.
It's 6:30, and the strap on S’s dress breaks. I'm trying to get on my suit, get my tie tied. Now we have to deal with this small emergency. Thankfully, S decides that the dress might actually look better without the straps. So, without much ado, I fetch the scissors to cut them off. I feel a little dorky in my blue suit with the blue tie. When I get to the gala and everybody’s dressed in black, that feeling will only increase. But in a way, I also feel a sense of pride that I’m just kind of a normal boy who doesn’t know much about fancy galas and dresses like he’s going to CCD or church or Easter dinner or something like that.

We decide to walk, as the Cult 100 Gala at the Guggenheim is only 15 blocks from my apartment. But after maybe 10 steps, S realizes that her Manolo Blahniks aren’t going to carry her that far. So we hail a cab at the corner of 73rd and 3rd. The night feels very free and romantic. And when we get there, we realize we're among the first to arrive. Again, painfully middle-class early.

We loiter outside and meet the cultured editors who are getting ready to let people on the red carpet and watch as guests get out. It's a warm, sunny evening, and the Guggenheim is flanked by the park, so it's not unpleasant to just hang out there. S says she doesn’t want a cigarette so that when she meets people, they don't smell it on her breath. But I can tell that she wants one.

After about 20 minutes, the red carpet starts to hum and the gala officially opens. I get 15 seconds on the red carpet. S doesn’t—she's a plus one. Apparently, I have no choice in the matter. And then we go in together. Servers militantly serve wave after wave of free cocktails and lobster rolls, mini smash burgers, some kind of salmon tartare. And I recognize the DJ, Miles Robbins, who I used to play intramural dodgeball with back before the pandemic. I go and say hi to Miles—how you doing? It’s funny. We’re both in a good mood. It’s a nice night.

We watch ourselves as if from above—lower-bottom-tier guests from the downtown world. I’ve gotten a haircut and shaved. And in my blue suit I feel unbearably young—not at all my age. Not particularly confident, but not listless either. Just sort of neutral. Not in black. Not one of the people who looks like they go to these kinds of things all the time.

I start to recognize other people I know. Dominic, a tech reporter who covered Doomers. An actor who’s a plus one, who’s come to see a few shows, but whose name I’m now forgetting in retrospect. But very nice of him to say hi. I told him to come back to BCTR—see more shows.

Eventually, after an indefinite purgatorial period of eating and drinking, mingling, there’s a program for the gala. Sarah Jessica Parker gives a speech. Walton Goggins and Chloe Fineman do a skit. There’s a subway take with Molly Gordon and others—celebrities I can’t remember and didn’t recognize. Maybe they're TikTokers. I’m not really sure.

The sketches aren’t funny but no one’s really trying that hard. I watch the whole thing from the concentric circle gallery tiers of the Guggenheim. I wave at S who’s down below, as close to SJP as she could get but now trapped in a giant mass of well-dressed people. Later, S will tell me that she cried when SJP appeared. I understand. She’s seeing her idol, the person who she wants to be, and I understand that emotion. It’s a wonderful emotion.

And after the official ceremonial—whatever you want to call it—portion of the event is over, Julia Fox comes on to DJ. I notice that Walton Goggins’ wife is a little uncomfortable with all the female attention he’s getting. There’s a hierarchy of celebrities at the event. It’s clear that SJP and Walton are at the top—one famous for 40 years, the other famous for six months, but somehow equally iconic. The next tier is murky; Molly Gordon and the like. Julia Fox is somehow in her own category—unshakeable, authoritative in her own world at the DJ booth. It’s unclear if she’s playing her own music either, but whatever she’s playing, she’s enjoying.

Various people come up to talk to her and she seems quite friendly. I don’t talk to any of the celebrities because I don’t have anything to say. Besides, I’m on the list too—maybe they should talk to me. Maybe they should know who I am. It’s a pride thing.

I run into a writer acquaintance who tells me they read a pilot I wrote but never sold, but that apparently has been circulating and that she's not supposed to tell me that. Well, that’s great. Can someone just buy it and not circulate it? Who knows.

After the gala, S and I talk to two employees of the Guggenheim itself who seem happy to have been able to stay for the event. We’re all a little tipsy. They talk about doing a collaboration with the Guggenheim and how they want to do more performance events, and we say we’re interested—but who knows what will come of any of these things.

Then S and I walk down to the Carlyle, happy and maudlin. She’s in her bare feet, holding her shoes. The Carlyle has a line out the door, so we try going over to the rival hotel bar across the street. It’s absolutely horrible. Incredibly, even more expensive than The Carlyle. We have to get out of there—can’t possibly waste $400 eating steak tartare and having one drink. The place looks like it’s stacked with Russian mobsters and prostitutes.

We end up at Melody’s, a piano bar on 73rd where everyone’s on a date. Everyone’s kind of ugly and ungainly and awkward. Somehow the piano bar attracts lonely desperate types, but there’s something sweet about it. We have a drink each and a bottle of sparkling water, and with the cover charge for the band—which is quite good—we end up spending $90 anyway. There’s no cheap night on the Upper East Side post-inflation. Maybe JG Melon’s, but that’s still pretty pricey and you have to pay in cash. But we’re happy anyway.

It was a night to remember—just because we could say we were there. Because S could wear her Manolo Blahniks five feet away from Sarah Jessica Parker and feel that she was on the right track in life. And because I could take four seconds of red carpet photos. Because I was wearing a suit my mom helped me pick out. Because I’m still basically the same person I always was. Because the important thing is that there are people who love you, people who are close to you and who cut the straps from your dress or find a tie to match your suit or tell their friends they’re proud of you and who aren’t threatened by your talent, discipline, and good fortune and don’t wish you downward mobility—who wish you the best.

Friday.
There’s an early performance of Soonest Mended at 6:15 p.m.—my open marriage play. The audience isn’t big, but they’re enthusiastic, and the evening goes quickly. Afterwards, they hang out on the BCTR roof because it’s a gorgeous night. Manhattan looks like sequins and feathers and satins parading across the East River.

The weekend is quiet, and Sunday I teach the final weeks of my playwriting and acting class. The actors do their showcase and the scenes are quite good. I pour them all celebratory shots, and after the scenes, they all linger—happy and satisfied with their good work and their new friends. The actors go off to a bar as far as I can tell, and that night I have a reading of my new play, Over the Moon, which I always do for new plays—staged readings that help me hear where the plays suck and where they’re good. There’s a mix-up, so one of the actors I need doesn’t show up, and I plug in someone from the audience to read. But they’re not quite right for the role—but it’s okay. It’s just a reading. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

There aren’t many people there—maybe 10. It’s kind of a low-energy evening, but I think that’s important because it helps me hear where the play needs work. The first reading was a big crowd and high energy, and sometimes you can start to convince yourself that a piece is ready before it really is. And you start to convince yourself that its ambiguity is specificity, and that its variety is imagination, and that its darkness is realism. But you’re still actually working toward those things. You haven’t arrived yet.

Monday was of no special significance.

Tuesday, May 6th, is the release of my novel The Sleepers. I have a two-part program for my book release: at 8 p.m. I’m reading at Molasses Books in Bushwick, and there’s an 8 p.m. party at Funny Bar. Molasses is the Shakespeare and Company—the pre 2020’s version of the Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the one where Jesse meets Celine in Before Sunset—of Bushwick; and when I get there, it’s full of people who aren’t there for the reading and will certainly find me annoying. I feel kind of guilty and anxious that I’m going to have to eventually start to read from my stupid novel and they want to just drink wine and coffee and flirt with the neo-hipster next to them.

The bartender is gracious and greets me. Eventually, my friends start to trickle in, and maybe intuitively the regulars start to trickle out. A lot of my closest friends are there. I feel grateful for their presence. My agent Mike is there, my editors from Arcade, Stefan and Carter.

In a corner, using a microphone and a little speaker, I read for about 20 minutes from the end of the book. People seem to like it. A few of the regulars or strangers stay. We hang out for another 30 minutes and then a handful of people buy books, and then a group of us make the trek to Funny Bar via the J train—which is a pretty short jump, all things considered, from Bushwick.

At Funny Bar, Colette and Eowyn, two NYU actresses who’ve become regulars at BCTR—Colette was in Dimes—have graciously arrived early to set up a book stand. As soon as I arrive, I run into a journalist who’s there to write about my book. Guests are starting to trickle in. The book table looks impressive—but the bartenders are in a bad mood and it’s hard to get a drink.

I shouldn’t drink while I’m giving an interview, so I go over with the journalist and we talk for a long time—while I’m constantly interrupted by well-wishers and I have to say, "I’m on the record, can I talk to you in a minute?" and they’re all going, "Oh, I’m sorry!” And it’s okay—they didn’t know.

The interview ends, and I notice that in the time I’ve been talking to the journalist, the population of the bar has doubled or tripled. It’s quite packed. I look for S—she’s there. She looks great in a black dress. I’m also wearing black, and I guess we’ve learned our lesson from the Cult 100 Gala.

Colette and Eowyn have brought a lot of NYU Zoomers, which is fine. They’re actually buying books. They’re quite excited to buy a book—for the Zoomers it’s something exotic, a book party. I’m happy to sell my book on the basis of exoticism. I get asked for signatures. I’m quite chuffed.

I wasn’t doing much drinking at the beginning of the night—or none at all—but eventually I find a way to commandeer my free drinks, because I’ve brought a lot of business to the bar, by the way, via the maître d’, and then people start buying me drinks. And suddenly it’s 3:30 a.m., and we’ve found ourselves at the Magician nearby, which is still open. My friend Drew—who I need to put in a play, really—buys me a drink, and at this point Christian Lorentzen has shown up to hang, and I realize I haven’t had a drop of water to drink all night.

Wednesday—I was incredibly hungover but had to teach my first fiction workshop, and mostly spent the day trying to get in good enough shape to teach the workshop, which went pretty well, but I could have been in better form. I was just happy to get through it.

The next night, Thursday, I’m reading with so-called Substack novelists Ross Barkan, John Pistelli, and Julius Taranto at BCTR (I’m hosting myself). It’s a totally different crowd—jocular but nerdy Substack guys, for the most part—who have come out to see the IRL materialization of the Substack literati. The atmosphere is fraternal and friendly. It’s a nice follow-up to the big book party; not glamorous, very normal—drinking on the roof kinda thing, talking about books. Later that night, I run back to Chinatown, where I’ve skipped a Doomers show but need to attend a dinner, which I can only term, loosely, “an industry dinner”—and which happens to include a TV celebrity who was at the show that night.

Friday, we have another and final Doomers performance at The Bench downtown, and there’s a big crowd, and the show’s really good—one of the best the cast has given in a long time. Apparently, there’s a billionaire’s daughter there who I’m supposed to meet, but no one connects us. I’ll never know what could have come of the suggestion.

Saturday, after playing football all morning at the Parade Grounds with my boys, Soonest Mended had its final show—and BCTR held a party called Doomest Mended to celebrate the closing of both plays. Over the course of the night maybe 75 different people came; and all night there were different groups eating takeout and drinking on the roof and talking in the theater space, and I was there until about 2 a.m.

That’s about where my long week ended.

WHAT MATTHEW GASDA THINKS YOU SHOULD DO

my play Dover at Artx (editor's note - this play has concluded, but the BCTR calendar can be viewed here with upcoming show dates)

8 1/2 at Film Forum

A Town without Time with Gay Talese and Alex Vadukl May 22nd, Rizzoli books

touch football parade grounds

molasses books (open til midnight)

funny bar (mingle, be glamorous)