MY DIMES SQUARE THINK PIECE

A Review of Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square

Photos by Nick Dove

Dimes Square (the revival) is introduced as a period piece, both at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research and in the preliminary murmurs I hear about the return of this play. It's an absurd concept at face value. The play was written and first performed in 2022; capturing a time in New York right after covid and still full of Covid-era restrictions—an era ripe with living room parties, small “r” rebellion, and big “a” Ambitions. It wasn't all that long ago. The changes in culture since, arguably, are perceptible only through the lens of the microscopic or the self-indulgent: the loss of friendship, the loss of a local haunt, the loss of whimsy and bohemia and the shattering of an illusion that you were on the precipice of something.You might, from such a vantage point, get the sense that everything has changed over the course of a few short years. Cast your gaze forward a century or back a few decades, and you realize that everything is more or less? the same.

In another sense, the term “period piece” wryly evokes the inevitable pitfalls of contemporary art about a contemporary moment - it’s dated the moment it goes to print, reaches the screen, sees its first performance. Collective consciousness in whiplash, you might truly struggle to remember what things were like back then, a bygone time, last summer, the summer before that. If the Contemporary Art in question is good, then sincere threads of things that are True emerge, even from beneath a veneer of satire. If the play delves into the emotional interiority animated by a particular moment, something more timeless might emerge. A Period Piece, in name and spirit.

In the forward to Dimes Square and Other Plays, a 2023 collection of Matthew Gasda’s scripts from around the period Dimes Square encapsulates, writer and cast member Christian Lorentzen writes that “It would be absurd to say that we are living in the golden age of underground arts in America.” Lorentzen cites the consolidation of almost all independent endeavors under big hat umbrellas or worse, into collapse, as clear evidence of this phenomenon. “Yet, the same technologies and material conditions that have brought about this scenario cannot help but cause the rise of something like its opposite,” he continues.

I approached Dimes Square with a sense of slightly morbid curiosity. If the social scene the play revolves around was cringe in 2022, it is even more cringe now. Dimes Square is written at the end of an era, and the inevitable conclusion in watching the play now is that things have only gotten worse. In October, 2023, Matthew Gasda wrote in Compact, of the pandemic era downtown: “There was a tension between those who really truly wanted to leave the internet behind, and those who instinctively wanted to integrate the online into the fabric of nightlife—and the latter won out.”¹

After the performance, my morbid curiosity feels less morbid. Dimes Square is hazed with a strange nostalgia as actually experienced - strange in that there’s a sense of suffocating self-absorption emanating from almost all the characters on stage, and the natural impulse is to actively dislike them. As visual artist Rosie (Anastasia Wolf) tells a newcomer to the group, “None of these people will be hanging out in a year, let alone six months. It’s rotting” - and you know this to be true, yet there remains a desire to root for youthful, decadent, self-absorbed, exuberance.

Dimes Square follows with a few scenesters in a ChinaTown loft over the course of a few nights. The conversations tow the line between the intimate and the pretentious. The intimate becomes confessional, and then the intimate becomes the pretentious. Everyone is sleeping together, everyone is miserable, everyone is talking over each other, everyone is coked out, obviously. It’s a tough genre to explore without being trite, and the title of the play sets itself up for accusations of cliché and self-indulgence, but in truth the play is moving, and it surprises me in its genuine sincerity.

In 2022, the scenesters in Dimes Square played themselves. Now, the cast is mostly new, save for Christian Lorentzen and Bob Laine - real life literary critic and writer/actor respectively - on stage, aging writers and agents, compatriots to youth in the scene. The characters of Dimes Square, while not offline, per se, are grounded in physical space, in Dimes Square, in a ChinaTown apartment, and their network of friends and their bleeding aspirations - not exclusively on their phones. These scenesters and hanger-oners can be faulted, above all, for their cruelty. They are cut-throat, selfish, coked out, willing to smear a friend's debut novel for the sake of their own debut film/Netflix deal/ gallery show. But no one in Dimes Square (the play) is pathetic in their inability to actualize anything, really… and isn’t that the real hubris of downtown New York and contemporary youth? No one laughs at successful young artists for being subtly opportunistic and privately mean. People laugh at young artists who consider inertia, drug habits, and hanging out to be the crux of the art.

On a material level, the conditions the characters of Dimes Square occupy actually are quite optimistic. Stefan (Dan Blick) just sold the rights of his novel to Netflix. Rosie (Anastasia Wolfe) has an upcoming gallery show. Terry (Sean Lynch) has a movie screening at Metrograph, and the general consensus is that it's actually good. Even Klay (Malcolm Callender), a flirty and somewhat grasping writer in the group who is still on the come up, is a staff writer at a magazine, the magazine albeit being Vice.

As college girl Ashley (Collette Gsell) points out, rebutting a claim that the Scene kids are the worst people in New York, at the dorms:

“Everyone just sits around vaping and watching TV and not having a libido.”

“Are they all getting fat?” asks Iris (Sadie Parker)

“Pretty fat, yeah,” Ashley replies.

There are elements of in-group referentialism to Dimes Square, and it's true that the first time around, the play was viewed by many people who recognized or hoped to recognize themselves in the performance. Dimes Square was well-received in 2022, however, and the resulting buzz has given the revival a life of its own. This time, the audience has a few more degrees of separation from the art. The references - Kiki's, Clandestino, 169 Bar, poetry MFA students calling things “retarded” - now operate more as slightly ironic cultural markers than as inside jokes. Even without assured shared context in the audience, the references, and the world they speak to, hold up - evoking a sense of time and place in a more granular way. It's a testament to the play’s ability to transcend the hyper specific audience it speaks of, when it comes to who it speaks to.

Then again, I wasn’t there the first time. The fall has been fast and steep. It’s strange to watch a performance of a satire and find yourself reflecting fondly on the golden days you missed. I saw some notes online today about how young people call everything “slop” because they're in a panic that they’ve missed the last echelons of cool. They’re frantically jumping from social scene to social scene, but nothing is going to stick. Keep coping. I think there’s probably some truth to this. The mere act of IRL gathering and creating or consuming any sort of longform art becomes increasingly counter to all the forces driving our contemporary world. As Gasda suggests in Compact, Dimes Square (the neighborhood)’s deterministic moment of failure came when those who wanted to integrate the internet beat out the bohemians.

In the forward to the script of Dimes Square, Lorentzen suggests that Dimes Square (the scene) (the neighborhood) was a reactive opposite to the corporatization and sterilization of most everything else. He describes the micro-neighborhood that emerged as “the last refuge in a downtown that had become generally uncool.” Ideally, an opposite to a corporate art world should not merely yield heterodox conversations at parties but should also refer to holdouts creating non-corporatized art. Gasda, an obviously preeminent voice, emerges as one such holdout.

Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, where I see the play, remains an enclave representative of thoughtful ideals and some bygone times. As a performance, Dimes Square is very special - chairs assembled around the living room theater stage in a semicircle so that your view is different depending on where you find yourself seated, your attention feeling almost like it’s drawn by happenstance as the boundaries between stage and theater sometimes merge, a sense that you are holding your breath, eavesdropping on a conversation, the whole veneer might drop, your privilege as a fly on the wall revoked, if anyone catches you listening and looming in on this strange, strange scene.

Dimes Square is a satire that avoids sneering. It does not indict its characters as caricatures so much as it watches idly by while they tumble into tropes, all of their own accord. Dimes Square doesn't concretely gesture toward the inevitability of crashing out, but it does trace a complex web of human desire amidst contemporary conditions. What does ambition and art and grasping and striving and yearning look like in the Most Sterile Times In Human History? Or, as cancelled musician Nate (Nick Walther) suggests at both the beginning and end of the play, “the dumbest times in human history?”

1. I don’t want to write a review that is confessional, but I arrived in this ecosystem after The Internet Won. Innate in this reality is some admission of my own fallacy - engagement with a social ecosystem that anyone with a shred of self-respect had already left about the time I was graduating from college, a tendency towards reaction, a tendency towards hyper-contemporary slop of the type spawned by screens, not salons.