Dimes Square and The End of History
Novalis” was the nom de plume of the polymath Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, an 18th-century German Romantic poet, novelist, and philosopher. Novalis is also the name of the Substack under which Matthew Gasda publishes daily entries in his “Writer’s Diary,” including philosophical ponderings, social observations, and short fiction. Gasda, like von Hardenberg, is a polymath: a diarist, poet, novelist, and playwright who has written some 17 plays and recently founded the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research.
Gasda’s 2022 play Dimes Square, about a group of artists and media types set in a Chinatown loft, put him on the map, both literally and figuratively. Dimes Square, caught the attention of theater critics like Helen Shaw, who subsequently appointed Gasda (or, rather, claimed that he “appointed himself”) “the dramatist of the Dimes Square scene.”
Geographically, Dimes Square is located on the eastern edge of Chinatown, the neighborhood at the juncture of Ludlow and Canal Street. It even has its own Wikipedia page, where it is noted that Dimes Square has “become a symbol for a handful of associated counter cultural and aesthetic movements centered in New York.” And indeed, in 2021, for those who circulated through its environs and breathed the air, or read about it in social media and came down to see what it was all about, it became a symbol for the wide-ranging intellectual and creative environment that emerged in downtown New York City during the pandemic.
The much ballyhooed Dimes Square “scene” is made up of ambitious downtownistas: writers, artists, actors, “scenesters,” anyone, really, who wants to be somewhere where something is happening, something creative and exciting. There is an energy generated by physical places like Dimes Square where people gather to make art, exchange ideas, and gossip, much in the same way that the firing of neurons in your brain give rise to your mind (if you believe in such a thing). At a time of interrupted socialization and isolation due to Covid, there was an abundance of creative activity fomenting downtown, including the founding of a local paper, The Drunken Canal (now defunct) and several literary magazines: Forever, The Drift, Heavy Traffic, Mars Review of Books, and Tense, the latter of which was founded by the writer and impresario Beckett Rosset, whose West Village loft housed many of Gasda’s theater productions. Indeed Beckett’s 432 Hudson Street locale became as popular an underground gathering place to watch performances and listen to readings — to see and be seen — as the restaurants and bars Clandestino, Dimes, KGB, or the down-and-dirty watering holes, Tile and Scratcher.
The publication of Dimes Square and Other Plays (Applause, 2023) collects four of Gasda’s plays: the eponymous Dimes Square (February, 2022) as well as three more intimate dramas: Quartet (June, 2021), Minotaur (June, 2022), and Berlin Story (July, 2022). I’ve been in attendance at all the plays collected in this volume, in all their various and many performance spaces. I missed the premier of Dimes because Gasda, whose duties at that time, in addition to director, often included doorman, and he had removed the cinder block holding open the door at Ty’s loft earlier than expected — I admit I was a little late — and left me and my guests out in the cold. We took refuge in Iron and Wine, the local hangout bar down the street. A few DMs later that evening straightened the matter out and I was at the play the following night. Ty’s loft was one of the several intimate spaces in which the plays were performed. Prior to the founding of the Brooklyn Center, they were all staged in homes (apartments or loft spaces) in intimate settings, with minimal design, by a mixture of professional and non-trained actors, wearing pretty much their street clothes. Gasda’s theater is the farthest thing from commercial theater you can find. As the critic and writer Christian Lorentzen (who made his acting debut in Dimes and also appeared in Berlin Story) notes in the forward of this collection, these plays investigate a wide array of themes and behaviors and attitudes including incest, adultery, sexual identify, careerism, cynicism, intoxication, pornography, and war tourism.
The earliest of the plays to premier, Quartet, is about (insofar as ‘about’ is ever an appropriate word) four uninteresting, shallow people who get together to fuck, or, excuse me, exchange partners. The characters are an “aristocratic alcoholic,” a “classic WASP,” a “basic bitch” corporate striver, and a young “corporate lawyer.” We learn that Nic and Elizabeth are fucking. And that Nick and Jay have fucked. While the women appear to have a modicum of awareness of values other than money and sex, the men are mentally stunted and juvenile and cherish only their erections, porn, beer, sports, and video games. These people want to feel special but they’re not special, and they seem unable to reconcile this. The issue with them is what Ellie tells Jay: “You’re not interested in anything that doesn’t confirm what you already believe or stray too far from the topic of ‘you.’” Each depthless character is locked into their ego. Can they break out of their narcissistic posturing and become “interesting”? Hard to say. Their sexual escapades and the coke and alcohol they consume are no longer markers of debauchery they think it is and don’t make their indulgence in these drugs interesting because behavior of this type has been normalized. They are the bourgeoise. Their performative transgression of norms cannot be a substitute for their lack of any kind of spiritual or existential understanding of themselves. They are like adolescents, as Jay notes, and they seemed doomed to stay that way.
Minotaur is a “warmed-over family saga” as the nasty, self-involved writer Clara describes it. The family members are at each other from the first act to the closing act. Doug, the husband of Edith and father to two daughters, Clara and Maud, hasn’t gotten over the death of his first wife. Edith, his current, long-suffering spouse, is burdened with “Mastectomy scars, pregnancy scares, stretch marks and cellulite…” Clara lives on her phone and may be at bottom no more than a “third-rate hack.” Maud is engaged to Marco, who may be gay, and is secretly having an incestuous affair with her half-brother, Theo. The latter is a filmmaker/bartender who made one film and is out of ideas. The climax of the play occurs — and at this juncture we realize that we are, as Maude says, in “crazy town”— when Clara admits to Maude that she too has slept with Theo. This bombshell reveals that Clara was wrong: this is no family saga, only a sad family acting out its neuroses with no catharsis in sight. At one point, Maud says to Theo: “I wish we could just talk for once.” His response: “No you don’t.” Gasda has said that he has “a good brain for psychology and the things that drive people to block and hurt others.” Minotaur is a fine example of that skill.
Berlin Story presents a melancholy portrayal of two, existentially tired, older men, Frank and Adam, who shamble in and out of the five acts, during which time their younger would-be girlfriends try to penetrate their world-weary, seen-it-all personalities. Which is all but impossible. As Frank notes: “I don’t talk about feelings; you just have to assume they’re there.” Frank, an “old geezer” is on a downward trajectory from war photographer to porn producer, who might save himself by, wait-for-it, becoming an “erotic” photographer. Adam, his roommate, is a journalist, jaded and indifferent to the point that when his girlfriend, Monika, asks him: “Do you think I have a nice ass? Do you think I have a nice pussy? A nice, tight, wet pussy?” He doesn’t get excited, all he can say is “It’s not bad” and “Sure.” Monika, who despite being degraded and debased by Adam, goes on to give him a choice of fucking her tonight and never seeing her again, or not fucking her and seeing her often as he likes. He chooses the former (the right choice) and she agrees to let him fuck her “any way you want” after which she will return to her husband. At the center of this melancholy play is the existential problem with which both men struggle: “… self-preservation against deterioration and bourgeois assimilation.”
“These are not plays that offer answers, takes, or mere supplements to the churning river of thoughtlings, idealets, and other mental debris that trickle minute by minute across our screens,” writes Lorentzen—who made his acting debut in Dimes Square and also appeared in Berlin Story—in the forward. Indeed the characters in these plays resist personal breakthroughs. There is no forward march to epiphany, no transcendence. No happy endings.
Dimes Square is by far the strongest piece in this collection, and may be Gasda’s most important play to date. Its themes go far beyond pernicious interfamilial manipulations or the melancholy musings of etiolated men and long-suffering women. One of the most interesting parts of Dimes Square is how Gasda depicts the lives of people who are incessantly online. (Halfway into the play, Klay, a journalist announces to the group, “Fuck, I’m way too online, aren’t I?” To which Iris, the poet, responds: “You’re like, Tweeting as we speak, so.”) The short exchanges in Dimes Square sound more like texts and DMs than dramatic dialogue. There are plenty of non-sequiturs. There are no extended soliloquies, no boring monologues, no in-depth psychoanalytic probing—no one asks why’d you say that, or what do you mean. The repartee is short, quick, pointed, often sarcastic, peppered with aperçus: (“Great literature deforms conventional language, forces a mutation; that’s just how it works”); psychological insight (“You surround yourself with people you secretly hold in contempt”); and wince-inducing humor (Stefan: “What’s up Terry?” Terry: “The opposite of down.”). Gasda has an ear for repartee as sharp as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s eye for immortalizing the ‘decisive moment’ in a photograph.
Much has been written about Dimes Square. It’s been hailed by Alex Vadukul in the New York Times as “an underground hit that consistently sells out performances.” Writing in Spike Geoffrey Mak noted, “As a comedy of manners, the play is as good as it gets.” But there are dissenters. In Vulture, Helen Shaw noted: “Gasda has a deft, humorous touch and a rare talent for steering large numbers of characters through a non-plot, but for a play about the value of thought and seriousness, there’s a strange absence at its center.” She singles out perhaps the key line in the play: “We are living through the dumbest time in American [sic] history.”
What is that time?
“We’re living through the dumbest time in human history” is the second line of Dimes. It comes out of nowhere, unprovoked, bombastic, a categorical observation delivered by Nate, a cancelled indie musician. It has become the most often quoted line in the commentary attached to Dimes, but Shaw is right, its import is insufficiently investigated in the play or, for that matter, in the penumbra of exegesis surrounding the play, including her own. The line goes unchallenged by Iris, to whom it is addressed. She acts as if she never heard it, replying: “How many times do I have to share my drugs with you before you recognize me as human?” A non sequitur responding to a non sequitur.
Yet the line begs the question: Why is this the dumbest time in human history? Even if Iris, a poet, can’t answer the question, an answer or an attempt at an answer, might provide some insight into the play, which is more than “a bunch of social climbers railing coke at 4am shitting on their so-called friends,” — as the scenester in the play Rosie characterizes it.
Why is this the dumbest time in human history? Has social media made us all dumb? (Or dumber.) Is it because the dominant style in the creative arts today is careerism, as Lorentzen has proposed elsewhere? Is it a combination of the two? Or something more. Perhaps it’s history itself.
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama famously declared the “end of history.” In his book The End of History and the Last Man he wrote that the conclusion of the Cold War in favor of the West marked the end of the ideological evolution of humanity because we were done asking the big questions — questions about freedom (it was for all), capitalism (it triumphed), and democracy (which would always win!). A Leibnizian best of all possible worlds. Many took exception to his claim and criticized his analysis as a simplistic and naïve understanding of history (which, if you read his book, you’ll likely see it is more complicated and less optimistic than the critics charged), but it remains the case that thirty-one years later liberal democracy and late capitalism are still dominant and no viable alternatives have presented themselves.
Dimes Square addresses the consequences of this hegemonic state of affairs — and, importantly, the cultural malaise it has produced. Neither artists nor cultural consumers seem capable of mustering enough intellectual muscle to challenge the existing ideological regime, either through mass movements or micro guerrilla flanking attacks: it appeares, sadly, we have surrendered.
What Guy Debord identified in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle has settled upon our culture like a miasma: “the ruling order's nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life." It is late capitalism’s “domination of all aspects of life” that is responsible for the commodification of art and the transformation of artists into careerists. The downward spiral toward total commodification of all artistic production is what Rosie, in Dimes Square, alludes to when she says that “the overall sense of cultural decline is deeply depressing.” This same sentiment is voiced by Terry, a successful screenwriter who laments the “total foreclosure of moral possibility and imagination in our culture.”
Detractors, who have called Dimes “incestuous, self-referential” and insular, “by literary scenesters for literary scenesters,” seem to miss the point that the play portrays what it’s like for creatives to survive in the contemporary competitive art ecosystem. Beneath the petty squabbling and jealousies and sexual competition the characters in the play exhibit, lurks their understanding that they are both captives and collaborators in the hegemonic attention economy. It should be no surprise that careerism has, in fact, become the dominant style in all the arts, not just in New York City, but across America and elsewhere to varying degrees. For perhaps obvious reasons (increasing economic precarity, increased student debt – often for MFA programs – and the mechanics of late capitalism, generally) it is harder than ever to be an artist. Careerism’s ascendance as a “style” has resulted in the creation of a liminal space between true artistic production and blatant commercialization. The lines that demarcate this zone are fluid, and because everyone wants to make it, no one minds much if an artist trespasses and enters the space between authentic art and sell out. Editor and critic Dean Kissick has noted that these days: “Artists don’t talk about their practices, they talk about their careers, which makes for an environment that fosters intense jealousy and stress and alienation and anxiety.” This is the world of Dimes Square.
As they enter and exit throughout the six acts of Dimes Square, the characters try to get their lives in order, seek meaning and love, even if they’re fleeting. They struggle to balance their day jobs and their hope for success, but remain suspended between “between the motion and the act”, “the idea and the reality”, “the desire and the spasm.”
The plays in this collection are, as Gasda has noted, “a collision between my own intentions and the polyvalent intentions of the world around me; they are the collision.” The plays capture the ethos of the scenesters of Dimes Square and the fractured dynamic of the family in Minotaur, the forlorn regret of the characters in Berlin Story, as well as the dissipated striving of the bourgeoisie in Quartet.
At the conclusion of Dimes Nate repeats his opening line in the play: “We’re living through the dumbest time in human history.” But, one wonders, if history itself is at an end, can we, for example, realistically expect to see an end to careerism as it is portrayed in the play? Will there come a time when aesthetic values triumph over commercial considerations in artistic production? Terry’s response to Nate may be the best answer for now: “Let’s try not to think about it.”