“We are living in the dumbest time in human history.” A character in Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square says this, and even if things may have been dumber before the printing press or a germ theory, I get it. Of course, things were dumber when human beings had less knowledge. But now information has never been more available, but actual introspection or idiosyncrasy has become increasingly exotic. “If there’s an original thought out there I could use it right now,” said Bob Dylan. He also said, “If my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”
Stick to the script, every opinion is valid, don’t hold an unorthodox view, things that are funny are not funny, teaching is not challenging, but affirming, everything is about identity and little else, and anyone who has any talent must honor a monastic oath or face swift Robespierrean banishment, just as Dylan and his thought dreams predicted.
I wish I was exaggerating.
Aeschylus said that we learned through suffering, but now learning is supposed to be the opposite, something fuzzy, inoffensive, a safe space, no contrarians allowed. Now we know everything I just said is not completely true, not yet, but it’s also not completely wrong. I don’t have a solution to any of this, but I do have quite a reaction. The 5th century BC, when Aeschylus invented theatre, was, imperfectly, a less dumb time in human history, and the playwrights and philosophers were not dead, white men, because whiteness had not been invented yet. Socrates denied the gods and look what happened to him.
Socrates also faced hemlock for corrupting the young, which must have been stimulating for everyone involved. Now there is a place where the (mostly) young dishonor the new gods, and you realize: that is the point. For a modest price, you can go to Ty’s loft in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to see what I mean. I was present for the creation myth of the author of this dangerous and possibly illegal play. I met Matthew Gasda when he was a few months away from graduating from Syracuse, where I teach and where I once lived. Radiohead’s King of Limbs had just been dropped, and we started talking about it with Talmudic precision. He was a poet, a philosopher, a Casanova, and a very dark comedian. One does not often see all of these qualities in a 22-year-old, but he seemed already fully formed. He looked a little like Harry Potter, but a bad boy version, and someone who seemed to have read everything. Because he was a non-gluten vegan, taking him out for dinner, which I did every week, meant buying him salad and red wine.
That was 10 years ago, and we never lost touch. When he came back to visit Syracuse a year later, we took an epic walk where we traded one idea after the next for movies that will never be made, and we would make them better now if we could. On the walk, which took an entire day, he pointed out that our ages were the same as those of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. My God, I never thought I’d be as old as Leopold Bloom, but there was Gasda, where the truth hurt and you wanted more.
I have gone to most of the plays that he has put on in lofts and apartments over the last 7 years, where there are characters who are too smart for their own good, and where desire overtakes reason, and it all starts over again. One play, Messages, was said, in rehearsal, to be designed to end relationships. You know it’s a good play when you want to keep watching even if it could ruin your night.
Gasda was always in search of creating an underground community for an alternative to dumbness. Dimes Square is a series of superbly choreographed rants about the publishing industry, streaming, the making and unmaking of literary reputations and how far it all feels from what we once hoped it could be. Plus Twitter. These rants come from young people and a couple of older ones performing invectives against the ridiculous state of our literary world feeding into banal streaming and social media climbing. Some are complicit in the dumbness, while others rage against it. Brooklyn book critic Christian Lorentzen acts from within while brimming with contempt for all things dumb, like a coked up Lear raging against the heath. He draws on all that bile and then some, chewing up the scenery every moment he is on stage, and he has lured quite the literary audience. When Dave, Lorentzen’s character, says he is only envious of two writers, Sloane Crosley and Joshua Cohen, I was on a beanbag with Crosley and close enough to see Cohen’s delighted reaction. Lockdown takes a toll, and the discourse goes underground. There is a creative class that has been going crazy. Everything is becoming euphemism. People are afraid of offending. Not in this play. This is the Substack of theatre. Everything was harmed in the making of this picture. Dimes Square runs through March, possibly longer. It is a speakeasy for the new 20s, where literary theatre dissidents meet. They've been adding shows because they are selling out, even though what it's all about not selling out.
Lorentzen, of Harper’s, LRB, and New York Magazine fame and one of our most devastating critics, had never acted before, and many people who turned out just to see what he would do. He was a powder keg, and the powder was part of the play. It was like entering the entire Malkovich portal. I found myself laughing, disturbed, thinking, and laughing again. At one point, Dave, his character, says
I tried the apps for a month. The fact is, I spent two decades trying to keep boring people out of my life... and off the scene -- but Tinder is a Miss America Pageant for boring people.
Near the end, Chris, the other older person in the cast, says this:
Klay, you write fiction -- or want to -- right? So listen -- he's not wrong to be hard on you and your friends; in fact, it's ethical.... People don't care about all t the books that were as good as almost Ulysses; they don't read them, . You they read Ulysses don't read 'almost-genius'; you don't give a shit about 'well-made'; you don't tell your kids about meeting 'relatively clever' at a party. No. Hell no. You get hard for shit that will survive over time, that is the product of real existential blood and tears, or you don't get your dick sucked at all -- you stay soft. Period.
High standards for literature do not always come with high standards for etiquette. Writing is not advocacy, of course, but dissatisfaction and its variations is quite the muse. And if you’re thinking of deleting that dating app, there is a place you can go for some confrontational physical reality, and you may not like that, either, but there’s only one way to find out. People are turning out for it. Some will be pissed, of course, and that’s part of the point. They say that you don’t go into this to make friends, but that’s only partly true, because the friends that matter will help you get through anything, especially the dumbest time in human history.