12 Questions for Matthew Gasda
The NYC Playwright on Zoomers, Boomers, Love, Sex, Marriage, and More
Several months ago, just having moved back to my hometown, following eight years away in Berlin and then Montreal, I found myself at a reading in an irritatingly elegant, trendy art and events space on the Lower East Side. After the evening’s program, which was oddly short (25 minutes long), I went outside to the smoking area to interlope many of the readers and attendees, something I’ve always hated to do but have realized that I must. Much to my dismay, writing, editing, and reading is only about three quarters, if I’m generous, of what one must do to succeed, and by succeed I mean gain a following, and by following I don’t mean starting anything remotely dogmatic or cultish, I mean obtaining readers; a writer doesn’t really exist without readers. Without readers, we’re merely some mumbly, bookish, loner types, speaking to ourselves in a convex mirror. The reader—the writer’s audience—is the person we’re having a one-sided yet conscious conversation with, and finding them is a task necessary to the survival of any would be, could be writer, commentator, novelist, essayist, or author… so, we, and by we I mean I, must act upon a word I’ve always considered a little revolting: networking.
And networking I was, in that fashionably minimal yet somewhat spiritually anesthetized Dimes Square event space filled with people in Dimes Square outfits (ironic school girl, ironic professor, ironic yet very empathetic and well-read member of the proletariat, high-falutin chef cosplaying as a vegetable farmer, self-reflexive fairytale princess turned whore, coked up rich kid turned Gowanus-based carpenter, etc.), which to be honest, I’ve also found annoying and nothing but a signal of a willingness to conform, to groupthink, but this is another conversation entirely. What, or who, I’d like to talk about is Matthew Gasda, the mid-30s writer known, among other things, for his much publicized underground hit Dimes Square, (recently published in book form, along with many other plays, by Rowman & Littlefield), his theater company, Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, and his widely read Substack, Novalis, where he publishes literary short stories and keeps an almost daily writer’s diary.
I’ve known about Matthew Gasda for a while now. I remember sitting in my apartment in Berlin, reading his NY Times profile, having a bit of that common and ugly feeling among writers: jealousy. Why wasn’t I back home making a name for myself among the downtown literati, creating prolifically, making connections and becoming known? Who the hell is this guy doing the things I’m not doing? This is also known, I believe, as scarcity mentality. Well, I know the hideous nature of these emotional states, and I quickly snapped myself out of it; I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I should be, there’s some sense of fate, and I needed time away from New York, from my family, from the drudgeries and common references of childhood. One person is having their moment, making their career, becoming influential… this has nothing to do with you. And all these thoughts occurred during the reading of Matthew’s NY Times profile, and by the time I finished it, had read all the facts and idiosyncrasies presented, I felt quite a deep sense of joy that there were other writers in my age range completing, and, better yet, getting attention for vital, philosophically and sociologically reflective works of social realism. I didn’t think much about Matthew Gasda after that, but over the past few months, since moving back to the city, I noticed his name on the lips of all sorts of downtown/Brooklyn writers and artists. Oh, Gordon, you’ve moved back to New York, you should talk to Matthew Gasda… You’re back! If you want I can put you in touch with Matthew Gasda… Matthew Gasda has a new show, maybe go and see it? Let me know what you think…You guys really should talk. And then, inevitably, I heard a somewhat callous, negative remark about this golden boy of the voguish New York independent theater world, literary world, arts world. Everyone knew about and of this man, and still, several years after, at party after screening after reading, his name was mentioned among interlocutors as often as a European from out of town asking: Have you please an extra cigarette? And so that callous remark, which is reminiscent of the five-minutes of jealousy I’d felt years prior, went like this: “Matthew Gasda? Yea, I saw his latest play here. It sucked.”
Fair enough, I initially thought. I’ve definitely been guilty of dismissing an artist’s work as something that sucks or is a piece of shit.
“What sucked about it?” I asked in response.
“I don’t know, it just sucked. Wasn’t original, wasn’t anything new.”
“What do you mean? Boring? Ineffective?”
“I don’t know.” The man, wearing a furry Burning Man-esque vest and a two-cornered bicorne (Napolean’s hat with a contemporary twist) replied, before turning away to talk to someone else about something else, I think Myanmar and a hidden beach, from what I could hear. I suppose I was boring him too, but it didn’t matter; I’d already lost trust in this guy’s deeply profound critical perspective, “sucks,” “idk,” “wasn’t original.” The terse Ben Brantley of my generation. And anyway, although at that point I’d never read nor seen anything of Matthew’s work, I thought this was slightly bizarre for a variety of reasons. Firstly, Matthew Gasda is, yes, stylish with some clout in a contained indie scene, yet he’s a man like any other, living in the hard economic realities of New York City, producing plays one after another while holding a day job as a tutor… does the landlord care how much influence one has between Delancey and Canal? And regardless, speaking poorly while giving unimaginative criticism about a fellow young artist in a similar socio-economic strata is really just poor taste, and, of course, often says more about the speaker than the subject… at least be more specific, call him derivative of someone, tell me the why and the how of the supposedly bad, inferior, second-rate work you’re attempting to discuss… But still, I’d be lying if the question didn’t remain somewhat indelible: did the play suck? Was the man all hype?
A few days later I decided to reach out to Matthew myself to ask whether I could attend, as ‘press’, a showing of his latest work, Zoomers—a seven-scene, two-act living-room slice of life portraying the woes and wanes of a cast of Zoomers and Millennials—at the All St. gallery on Hester. Matthew replied almost right away, extending a ticket to the show, which was full with, mainly, a hip and youthful crowd who may have been more excited about the idea of going to an indie play than witnessing a play itself, but that has nothing to do with Matthew Gasda, that set will always exist, and, frankly, they’re an audience that’s necessary for the hype of any production. And to get to the point, the play was well written with a neatly structured form. Gasda managed to comment on a perhaps overly commented upon generation in a way that seemed unique, mainly because instead of employing all the familiar tropes and cliches of Zoomer culture, he presented his cast as quotidian people with relatable problems. While the character's interests, minor behaviors, and unconscious drives/motivations might be different from those of other generations, they were not stereotypes. He managed to tell a story about, sorry to say it like this, the contemporary youth, without falling into condescension, haughtiness, or scorn, which is a tough task, considering how fucking annoying Zoomers are.
Since that performance, which, while not being a ‘perfect work of art’, really didn’t suck at all, I’ve become more familiar with Gasda’s writing and have been in regular conversation. And speaking of these figures in the arts with a good amount of connection, press, and reception, Gasda is a very empathetic, kind, and accommodating person, almost to a surprising degree… putting me in touch with other writers, providing advice and suggestions, a sheer willingness to reach out a hand and help. A work of art is, without a doubt, superior in all considerations to the moral character of its creator, yet I began to think about what Borges once said, that (and I’m paraphrasing) all good writers are, at the end of the day, despite all their vices, troubles, and trauma, very good people, very soulful people, very conscious people. For the most part I agree with Borges. I don’t really know Matthew Gasda, we’ve spoken on the phone and email a bit extensively but have never hung out in person; it’s 2023 after-all. At the same time, intuition does exist, something called the gut, and while I don’t know (or really care) about his pathologies or previous actions, I sensed, during our prolonged discussions, a soul deeply in touch with humanity, a soul that’s alive and curious, one that desires to live, and to understand why. I could be wrong, but who cares.
Unfortunately, journalism and criticism have become so cynical and pettily competitive that any act of praise toward a subject is regularly viewed as sycophancy. But this isn’t a puff piece. I mention this, instead, to pay respect to those very subtle yet important acts of kindness and sensitivity in individuals I come across, especially since, also unfortunately, there seems to be not much value placed in the warmhearted gestures of everyday life… even more especially within the hyper-competitive and egotistic minefield of the New York theater, art, and literary world. Tourists and out-of-towners regularly come to New York with a simulacrum-based persona packed on the surface of their luggage, a contrived ‘I’m walkin here!’, every man for himself gruffness and brutality, which, as any real New Yorker will tell you, is not indicative of the casually indifferent yet mindful, caring attitude that this city, at its best, both engenders and inspires when one really pays attention. People do, in fact, tend to have each other’s back, an aspect of personality that Gasda, who moved here from Bethlehem, PA, readily portrayed throughout our conversations, both public and private.
Below are Matthew’s answers to my various questions, enjoy.
GG: You’ve brought up the idea of a need for our iPhone addicted society to be resensitized. What do you mean by this, and how could it ever possibly occur? I’m also wondering how you believe it's affecting narrative forms of art such as theater, film, and literature.
MG: Art can't undo technology addiction, it can only give you moments of escape or relief. It can only restore a little fresco in a ruined palace and ultimately our only hope is to get rid of iPhones, to get rid of intrusive screen presences and ironically that'll probably be done if it can be done by something like AI and we'll have AI assistants. Technology people will be able to recede into the background and technology will basically be able to run the technological parts of our life, the part that we have to do manually now. We shouldn't have to interface with this kind of poison all the time to do our jobs or to connect with people.
And I think it's, I'm also going to say that phone culture has just made everything in the arts worse. Films are bad, books are getting shorter and becoming more and more homogenous and samey and music has this incredibly narrow range of tone and rhythm and there are fewer key changes and it's just all becoming algorithmic Spotify drone music.
Theater has never been an art form that's produced much quality and quantity at the same time. I mean, I would argue, even the Golden Ages of Theater have only produced a handful of classics. So yeah, I think there are a lot of really horrendous plays being written and a lot of fake good plays being written and that basically none of them are going to hold up and none of them do hold up. I mean, almost nothing that was produced five years ago will be produced today or reproduced and no matter how much new theater Samuel French publishes, no one's reading it, no one's, no one gives a shit about it. They have no, these things have no literary value, no lasting value. Yeah, we are less cognitively capable and as a result, less emotionally sensitive and as a result, despite immense resources and more leisure time than was probably available to previous eras of the human, we are less capable of producing great art. Yeah, there's going to have to be a reckoning with this, a rehabilitation of the human spirit, a rejection of the behavioral norms that were invented 10 to 15 years ago. There's going to have to be a new kind of existentialism on one hand in which we recognize that even if technology can extend our lives, eventually it's made the content of our existence worse; it's turned existence into content rather than existence. It's narrowed the range of embodied experience and wrecked the aesthetics of life. We're going to need rebels, we need to be rebels. And there's going to need to be a restoration of human ecology, like we have to physically and materially restore aspects of nature into human society, reintegrate nature into human society and to the mind. The mind has to escape its physical bondage to the screen. There's no other way around that. We're going to need a 60s moment without irony–or something bigger than that. A totally new kind of human social movement.
During Zoomers, your latest work of social realism on the subject of Zoom-ennial malaise, I couldn’t help but think about the idea of trust. What do you think of the Zoomer relationship with trust, both with themselves, with their social circles, and with society at large? How would you say it compares to previous generation’s relationship with trust?
The question, this question of trust is interesting, not one I would necessarily associate with Zoomerism. I think maybe it's because Zoomers don't have a notion of trust. They came of age at the high point of cancel culture, and it's like, it's totally second nature to them. And in fact, what the Millennial calls cancel culture, the Zoomer might call call-out culture. There are no privileged relationships. You can take down your professor, your parents, a politician, your friends, whether in a public call-out or a private call-out. I tweeted recently that what older generations call demons, younger people just call toxic or toxicity. So basically they have no notion that there's a soul, that other people have souls. You're just sort of right-thinking or you're toxic; you are medicated and well-behaved or you're toxic and abusive and have to be erased. They have no notion that there can be local or tribal preferences, like no notion that, you know, say the mother of a criminal might still love their son or that, why someone would quote, stand by their man or why you might have patriotism or loyalty to your country. It's a hyper-liberal generation in which blank slate theory is completely dominant, in which your body and your brain are just these wax tablets that are meant to be and can be formed according to whatever rational theory is generated by contemporary in-group rationality. So that's why there's this deep willingness to experiment biologically with your body and your mind among Zoomers because there's nothing else you can trust, so to speak. No universals. There's no human nature that you can refer to. There's no soul underneath the behavior that you can trust, that isn't reducible to pathology. There's no sin and there are no demons for that reason. It's actually a terrifying view of life.
It seems as though Zoomers have a somewhat different relationship with sex than others. By sex I don’t mean sexual identity, a topic of which that generation is very literate… I mean having sex. You touch on this theme in Zoomers, and I was wondering if you could say more on the sexual efficacy of the Zoomer generation?
I think the sex thing runs really deep–more broadly than just Zoomers; the 2010s, which were, I guess, their teenage years, witnessed a massive influx of Puritanism and sexual hypocrisy and erotic scapegoating and a total conflation of crimes with misdemeanors, of misdemeanors with depravity, and depravity with bad taste, and so on. But at the same time, it was also the era in which hookup apps came into existence. And I've written about this at times on my, my substack, this shift is something I'm interested in, something I took part in. In other words, most apps were contributing unregulated and massive shifts in sexual behavior; certainly, I think there was a time in my life where I was addicted to hooking up. I can't even say sex, but like just getting a date on a weeknight for the sake of getting a date and the game of seduction, which is, when it's mediated by technology, a lot less elegant, in fact, and kind of loses its aesthetic quality for the most part. And so there was this seed of monstrosity or compulsiveness that was planted in almost every modern young urban person. And this had a foreground too, namely the explosion of easily accessible porn in the previous decade, the aughts. And so I think people of my generation and the Zoomers below us were not having sexual interactions in a very thoughtful way, to say the least. And at the same time, we're in some cases not having sex at all.
So I think in effect, and this is borne out in the play, Millennials became these like Tinder addict polyamorous satyrs, while Zoomers are completely obsessed with sex but too disassociated to access it, don't know how to talk about it, but also feel this social pressure to gain experience. So there’s a Zoomer tendency to cancel older people who are more comfortable with sex, but maybe more sinful, fallen; but at the same time–this generation that finds sex really alien logically seeks age gap relationships even while judging them–like there’s serious cognitive dissonance. Even more broadly, I think in a sense, what I'm trying to talk about is the lack of a humane framework to talk about sex and transgression with, to make sense of these technological prosthetics and capital-driven market pressures…. For Zoomers, it’s just the water they are fish in; they can’t separate from it or analyze it. So it's no surprise that their byword is toxic because everything around them, both body and soul, is toxic. And so they can't conceive of conceiving of themselves or others in anything other than toxic. They can't conceive of having a conversation with someone about their poor choices or with themselves about their poor choices because they don't imagine they can change each other's minds. Why would toxic talk to toxic about being toxic?
Angels in America vs Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? People have often talked about you in the same breath as that latter play… Can you say a bit about your very distinct approach to blocking?
It's interesting you bring up Angels and Woolf—both of which, I should note, were directed on screen by Mike Nichols in very different eras, the 60s and the early 2000s–because they probably are the most paradigmatic modern American plays, and they are both distant influences for me. They're not primary influences, they're not plays I've read over and over, but definitely plays, of course, I've read and movies I've watched, and they're both works that, like my own, locate the pathologies of the present in specific people or use individuated American voices to let these underlying demons in, so to speak, angels in America, literally. I guess what you could say about Albee and Kushner and myself, even though I think we're all otherwise very different playwrights, is that we all do believe that Americans and American life has demons and has psychosis and has a soul, and that soul can experience schism and breakdown, and that what a play can do is chart those dark waters so that the person in the audience doesn't necessarily have to.
And as for my somewhat unique approach to blocking, I don't know, I think it's a separate question actually, but… yes… my own approach to blocking I think is either a step forward or a step backward from canonical American theater making–which is really tied to these big, the big Broadway machine and the big regional theater machine (regardless of the quality of the play, even the director and the actress has this machine-like quality). What I want actors to do is to know that they, as long as they really honor the words and know what they're saying, that they have a tremendous amount of freedom physically to change the show each night, and that the words are kind of a force field or an electric current that they can plug their bodies into, plug their voices into, in different ways at different points, and that there's always going to be some kind of irony generated. If they're really sensitive to the irony that's present in the language, that if they jump up instead of fall to the ground, if they laugh instead of cry, on a particular line night to night, they're simply going to experience a different valence or potential of meaning, and that I really call unblocking, because that seems to me to be the point of theater is to unblock certain animal and psychological energies, at least in a small space where there's no stage machinery that you have to remain in sync with, is an opportunity to explore irony that's not just inherent to language, but to language using subjects like people. And also allows actors to tap into the vertiginous and I think universal feeling of not being able to communicate exactly, the imprecision and blunt power of language.
As we briefly discussed on the phone, Zoomers and Boomers have in common a particular sensitivity and emotional reactivity to the technology around them. Why do you think this is, and, what else do they have in common?
Definitely a naive use of technology. Boomers because they were foreign to it; Zoomers because it was native to them. I think also there’s less of a sense of guilt and obsession over authenticity and a lack of it that I think people born between say 1970-1995 tend (and these are huge generalizations here) to have.
What was your lowest point as a writer and how did you come out of it?
I think basically I can say the years between 23 and 29 were a long low point, where I knew that I had talent, and as a result I struggled to keep my ego afloat, and in fact had to inflate it to keep it afloat, and while I think I actually produced some things, especially in prose, that are better than anything I'm writing now, at least on the sentence level, more lovely, more spontaneous, more alive, I basically lacked the temperament and self-awareness to edit both myself and my writing, and also to interact with actors as a director in a way that didn't burn them out or drive them away.
I think I had such a hard time when I was younger just being nobody, doing nothing, and I found it almost intolerable, and so I pushed myself to produce finished works right away, even if nobody read them, and in the beginning there were maybe a handful of people who believed in me or admired what I was capable of, but they certainly weren't in New York, and they certainly weren't at fashionable parties.
Grad school was kind of miserable too, and that was 24 to 26, and then I was a high school teacher, that was even worse, just utter soul-crushing drudgery, and I think I was, you know, definitely at my worst as a person. I was starting to get some attention as a playwright then, but in a sense it went straight to my head, a sugar rush.
I thought I knew better, thought I knew more about what I was doing than I did, and in many cases I excused my own kind of poor or reckless personal behavior in the name of romanticism or lyricism.
What and why, in your opinion, is the most irritating of all terms of contemporary expression?
I really don’t know. All the cliches of Internet jargon—many of which have leaked into my own writing and speech—are so dead to me that I feel like even to hate one is to privilege it. If I had to choose—I guess I’d say like the “exhaustion” trope.
Who are some of your favorite authors/playwrights/and filmmakers? Who has influenced you, who hasn’t?
Generalizing across different periods of my life, some very significant figures
Film: Fellini, Malick, Bergman, Antonioni, Godard, Pialat
Fiction: Austen, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Beckett, Gaddis, Pynchon
Philosophy: Kierkegaard, Nietzche, William James, Wittgenstein, Heidegger,
Poetry: Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Stevens, Crane, Ashbery, Ammons
& Much classical music, especially Bach and Schubert
You’re a healthy eater. Never smoked a cigarette, not a big drinker. What’s your perspective on the symbiosis between mind and body, between your relationship with food and your ability to write?
My perspective is that my perspective is synthetic–symbiotic; that there’s no separating mind and body and ecology. So I choose very carefully about what kind of loop I’m forming with food and chemicals, and I’m constantly thinking about how to make my brain, in particular, work faster–partially because there are these insane demands made of anyone who works in the cognitive economy–the economy of information and language–like I do. Obviously, I have no control group/cloned self who doesn’t do these things to measure myself against, but I feel that I have strong anecdotal reasons to think that it helps–and has helped me going especially through periods of low sleep, stress, and a sense of personal failure.
You have immense productivity, banging out plays in quick succession, directing them, running a theater company, all while tutoring to make a living. What’s the origin of this work ethic and what does it say about your approach to writing?
I think I was very lazy as a teenager, and as a consequence didn’t do very well–in school in sports in music–when I had plenty of ability; like definitely I had a strong sense of shame about underperforming my own native abilities–the sense of shame that Emerson says in Self-Reliance comes with letting someone else eventually achieve all the things you thought you would, express the original thoughts you had but kept silent on. And I think in my family–teachers and earlier steelworkers and further back peasant farmers–there’s a strong work ethic and expectation of work. So a lot of it was just embracing a sense of ancestory and purpose as I got older; I stopped being a middle class rebellious teenager (in my mid 20s) or like romantic poet and understood that I didn’t have nearly enough economic advantages to do anything than become an artistic laborer, a craftperson of a kind. I make plays so that my theater company exists–without new plays it would die–and that’s inspiration enough.
How much money does a writer in New York City need to make a year in order to do nothing but their own work? Why that amount, and what do you think you’d have been able to accomplish had money not been an issue?
We discussed this on the phone, but I think like my own standard of living which involves like the ability to eat out and take taxis occasionally and live in a studio apartment can happen around $75-80k (a number I can hit by doing theater, tutoring, and freelance writing). To live at something approaching “not total anxiety about money” would take probably double that; but I’ve lived, pre inflation in New York, for much less. But money is real–there’s very little romance to not having it. If I had it, maybe I would be able to write more novels or develop screenplays and films; I’m not entirely sure. I can develop projects with a longer gestation period.
You’ve mentioned previously that you might soon get married. I think marriage and its point, or pointlessness, is on the mind of every young contemporary couple. Why do you believe two people in love should bother getting married?
I never used to think so; and in many ways the idea makes me uncomfortable–largely because it’s so much about institutions, government and church–but I think on a frankly spiritual and moral level, I’ve reached a point where I think you have to take some kind of leap, some kind of bigger risk, or you risk withering, and you risk letting love die in your hands. I think a film that’s influenced me maybe more than others is Malick’s To the Wonder, which is about this: the collision between secular and spiritual ends in love; secular love will eventually die (because people get old, tired, annoyed), but love connected to a sense of the divine–not a church wedding divine, but a transcendental, from the heart divine–still can have some meaning. I’m not entirely sure what or how that would look, yet; it’s something that X and I discuss once and awhile. “What would a real wedding/marriage look like.” In a slightly more pagan sense, this is what almost all of DH Lawrence’s best books are about–and he’s someone who has always mattered to me, moved me. And also–I should be clear: up to recently, in my life, I’ve only produced a series of romantic disasters; I’ve been a complete failure in love. I’ve found myself very disappointing; I’ve been a coward. But I’m still alive, still young enough–so why give up?
Why do you write? Is this something a writer should know about themselves?
Hard question. I think it goes back pretty deep—to childhood. I had a very vivid imagination; I liked using words and telling stories; I told stories in my head all the time; and my family environment was very psychologically intense and we were expected to analyze ourselves and the people around us. So I think in a sense it was what I was, what I was formed into; it's the only thing I've ever been good at. Gift/curse situation.
Great piece!
i started following MG years ago on medium. i didn’t even know who he was. his diaries on the ny subway felt like the person i always imagined to be but never was. i’ve been following him here for a while and esp. with this piece things clear up a lot. if i lived in new york more than listening to wync and ste, i would totally hang out with you guys, would even document you. well, i’m not, so just a shout out to MG: your whining about our age feels a bit off as if you were looking for excuses not to be a great artist.