A graduate student named Athena is filled with brilliant thoughts and nowhere to put them, at least not in any monetized way. She’s too smart. The system is rigged. Her soul is not for sale, at least not yet. This is the moment to be morbid, but also to feel everything intensely while she’s here. Soon, the stakes will get much higher, but not yet.
This is from Mensch: The Musical, with a book cowritten by Matthew Gasda, anointed by Vulture as the Chekhov of the Dimes Square scene. (Dimes Square, featuring Christian Lorentzen, brilliant contrarian of Substack and beyond in a Malkovichian performance, is playing tonight and tomorrow night at 432 Hudson St. in Manhattan.) We worked on it together one crazy weekend around this time of year in 2018. What could go wrong?
“Down With the Ship,” sung in grand style by Haley Ayers, is about knowing the inevitability of it all, with no comfort or reassurance. It’s just the cold, hard, inescapable truth. Most of what you hear is a distraction. This is how it is, and this is how you want it. That singer is making your drink minimum more than worth it.