I meet D outside his dystopian apartment building on the corner of Chrystie and Houston. We decide that walking from the Lower East Side to deep Greenpoint is the perfect flânerie to get us in the mood for Afters, Matthew Gasda’s follow-up to Dimes Square that premiered last weekend at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research. Earlier D texted me “The only reason I’m in a good mood is that I’ve been inside for 24 hours.” I’m jealous because it means he’s been writing and I haven’t, but the breeze is just what we need on this cloudy Saturday night and dead-eyed revelers on Houston keep bumping into D as he stops to relight the J. It’s strong stuff and we’re almost to the river when we realize we’re a little North of the bridge and there’s no staircase or shortcut, we have to cut all the way back towards the main entrance just off Delancey and Attorney St. where I lived after my sophomore year of college when the Lower East Side had a very different aura and Dimes Square didn’t exist yet and I read Siddhartha and The Beautiful and Damned on the commute to my private equity internship.
I moved to New York for real in the first pandemic summer and became aware of Dimes Square before most normies because I followed a few notables on Twitter. Over the next year, I talked about it to anyone who would listen with a mixture of ironic obsession and sincere contempt that I recognize in the tone of Gasda’s plays. I even took a few sociological field trips to Canal and Division. By 2021 the lamestream media caught on and beat it into the ground until Dimes Square had been defined in so many different ways that it lacked an actual referent, it meant whatever anyone wanted it to mean. Then for a few months everyone was talking about it, and among normies I was a bit of an expert, and a year too late I fell into some tangential connections and next thing I knew I was invited by a magazine editor in my MFA program to see Jeremy O Harris’ Slave Play alongside the author of Fuccboi. In full disclosure, I pitched her this review and she responded that they’ve stopped downtown scene reporting in an attempt to be “less hyperlocal,” but I’m free to send her “literally anything else.”
But actually, it was all more calculated than that, it wasn’t just hyperstition. Last year I wrote a Substack that placed a line from Gasda’s public diary in conversation with quotes by Don DeLillo and Guy DeBord, then DMed him the piece which led him to offer me tickets to Dimes Square in exchange for an unbiased write-up. At the time I couldn’t think of a single interesting or novel thing to say about it, due more to my own insecurity on these particular subjects than the play, which I found very funny and creatively galvanizing but not transcendent. My lasting memory is sitting behind an unmoved Gary Indiana, watching the great author try out his friend’s Juul.
Now, on the way to the sequel, the sun descends behind our backs as we cross the hundred-year-old bridge, talking about life and reading the cryptic chalk on the walking path. By the time we emerge in Williamsburg, we’ve been walking for over an hour and we’re both ravenous but we know too many people that might be on Bedford. We leer at the Radegast crowd and D says he’s down to just hit a deli or something, somehow there is still an hour until the play begins and a quick Google leads us to SEA Thai, where a bouncer opens the door without looking up from his phone. The inside of the restaurant is vast and completely batshit, a DJ booth and an Instagram background sponsored by Grey Goose behind the host stand. We share a glance and embrace the late capitalist dreamscape, snagging the perfect table next to the central koi pond overhung by pastel paper umbrellas. Our lychee cocktail is grossly sweet, but the veggie black noodles are solid. The waiter asks me if something is wrong when I flag him down for the check but we’re just tight on time, even though we left two and a half hours before the show, and our only option to avoid being heinously late is an $11 Uber through weekend traffic.
I’m stressed the whole ride because we’re late and my back is sensitive to bad seating. At one point we pass our friends’ luxury building on the water and in a classic city coincidence I watch my girlfriend walk into the lobby in a green top on her way to dinner. This is a good omen, I think. D knows nothing about the play and he proposes we ditch it and crash the dinner party. I suspect he might be inspired by what we’re about to experience as I watch the black dot on my screen inch closer to the destination. The driver lets us out on a block of Huron St. lined with warehouses and no visible life. We dumbly crane our necks until a voice calls out my first and last name and we locate the man leaning out of a doorway above a small staircase. It feels almost too cute when he doesn’t need to check our QR codes, since we’re the second-to-last ticketholders to arrive.
We enter a crowded kitchenette and linger around the bar, struggling with where or how to stand. D is bald and I impulsively got a buzz the day before, hoping that a drastic haircut would counteract my growing malaise toward the present and future. I recognize a few actors from the first show and try to imagine their impressions of us, focusing on my posture. I opt for a whiskey, not wanting to be the guy who orders a Fernet, and we find two folding chairs in the back corner of a warm, bohemian loft. A few members of the cast are vaping on the couch slash stage area and D is looking around in childlike wonder. There are maybe forty seats and a wide age range, though nobody would be out of place at Kiki’s or an MFA classroom. Gasda gets everyone’s attention in his quiet, commanding way, encouraging us to react in a way that is “human,” and the show begins.
Afters revolves around Rosie (played by Gasda’s collaborator Cassidy Grady), whom we met in Dimes Square, and her sister, a social media manager visiting from Chicago. Rosie lives in an apartment paid for by her boyfriend’s crypto money, and besides selling a few paintings to microcelebrities, she is active in the scene. We find the sisters after a night out, hosting a group of self-obsessed, self-loathing guys and coquette core girlies, waiting for the cocaine to arrive. What do these people have in common? They are clever, and they are beautiful. They trade stories about dating and their myopic slice of the city punctuated by philosophical monologues on AI and art. The dialogue is sharp and referential in the extreme. The younger sister begs off early, maybe not wanting to watch Rosie do more coke, and Rosie announces the imminent arrival of her lover Ethan, setting off a chain reaction of excuses to exit the bender. One gets the sense these friends are not so close after all. It turns out Rosie has invited Ethan and her boyfriend/landlord, whose name I can’t recall but may as well have been Brad, a manchild with an evil handsome face I’ve seen in a thousand college movies and West Village bars, along with the requisite middle part and logoed puffer vest.
During the excruciating fight and breakup that follows, the couple sitting next to me is exposed. The girl on my right is neatly dressed in all black and literally on the edge of her seat. Several times already she’s been the only one to laugh at the mention of a certain banned substance or sceney restaurant. She emits knowing murmurs at a few dialogical aphorisms that are, let’s say, questionably sincere. The guy she’s with is leaning back and manspreading in his seat and hasn’t reacted much before the fight scene, hasn’t been “human.” But now they’re trading mutually exclusive laughs– her at Rosie’s pouty psychoanalysis, him at Brad’s cutting straight man logic. I catch myself paying more attention to my neighbors’ dynamic than the play itself. I consider they could be just friends; in fact, her spine has angled more towards me than him throughout, although she could be avoiding the support beam in our sightline. Her date is laughing louder at Rosie’s expense, it must be targeted, a game within the game.
On stage they’re both cheating on each other, but Brad doesn’t say I love you to anyone else, which plays conveniently into his superiority complex, not a difficult complex to uphold when Rosie’s horny for destruction, and so on and so on. At a certain point in their ping-pong match of rage and lust and selfish possessiveness, I understand that these are neither good people nor happy people but nevertheless they are entertaining and in love and, as they eventually admit, terrified of being alone. Their tenderness for each other is bound up with a psychic violence, the hallmark of a toxic relationship. A thunderclap booms in the middle of one of the fight’s many pregnant pauses and the timing is just ridiculous, pulchritudinous, as D would say. Everyone glances towards the fire escape window to check if the white noise of rainfall is part of the score or real life and when the downpour is confirmed I know I’m not the only one suppressing a grin at the magical atmosphere granted by an act of G-d.
Brad storms out, Ethan (a statuesque Bushwick model) comes back eager to do some blow, Rosie asks him to “fuck her and leave,” and this would be a natural place for an intermission. Instead, there is one more scene, and it’s a genuine surprise and delight, a tonal shift from the comedown at the end of the night and the viciousness of the fight. The lights are back on and it’s daytime in the apartment. Ethan saunters out to do his morning vinyasa and rip lines, joined shortly by Rosie’s sister, early to bed early to rise. She brews coffee and insults his vapid lifestyle while he plays it cool and flirts with her, soon they’re revealing childhood details and the sexual tension builds. They are trying to figure out if this particular taboo is good or bad or bad, if they will still be able to look down on Rosie after they get off on deceiving her, if pure desire is the moral answer of our time. There is a similar morning-after scene in Dimes Square between Rosie and another girl that didn’t quite hit for me, and I wonder if this one works so well because neither of these characters lives in lower Manhattan, forcing them to appeal to more universal tropes.
During intermission D goes to pee and I chat a little with the always equanimous Gasda – apparently, a garbage truck parked outside the night prior and made a similar noise to the thunder, followed by beeping instead of rain. I take my empty plastic whiskey cup to the kitchenette and find a sink filled with dirty dishes and coffee grinds where I can rinse out the cup and get some water. Last year I saw Book of Mormon on Broadway and I had a scratch in my throat under my mask, we’ve all been there, and at intermission I waited ten minutes in line to buy a water bottle that I barely drank because I had to choose between buying the water and going to the bathroom. While the reactionary label of the Dimes Square milieu certainly has to do with their COVID-skepticism and reappraisal of age gaps and willingness to say the r-word, a charitable interpretation would be that they wanted to foster a community with some measure of freedom from regulation and commoditization and official corporate bullshit that characterizes so much of the so-called arts, and at the very least Gasda and Grady have succeeded in creating a theater where I can fill up my water cup without paying or waiting in line. D, who’s been popping silver psilocybin pills from a metal tin in his pocket, reports that he was the most sober person in the bathroom line; luckily a guy poured him a glass of something that I confirm is Fernet.
The second half of Afters is dominated by the reprise of Dave, a cantankerous writer played by the critic and elder scene denizen Christian Lorentzen. It’s unclear to what extent his monotone monologues are driven by the sheer volume of his voice and persona, pacing “storklike” across the stage. Often, we are laughing in mere anticipation of his outbursts. Afterward, D said he was a terrible actor and a wonderful performer. Like the first play, nothing really happens or gets resolved, but here there is an understated sophistication to the whole thing, evident in the gorgeous set, transitions, and score, the triumph of this act of theatre research. Another after-party, another anxious morning after, and the play ends with everyone going to get nachos. The narrative arc is unsatisfying, but so is life, and there is genuine catharsis and fellow feeling in the room as the rain keeps falling on smokers and stragglers outside.
D texts me the next day raving, it’s the best play he’s seen in a while and he’s in grad school for dramatic writing. Even though I invited him because I wanted him to love it and I kind of loved it too, I can’t resist playing devil’s advocate. Because there is something that bothers me about the girl next to me aggressively laughing at every reference to ketamine or Freud or Clandestino. She gets it and she wants everyone to know, especially the girl sitting next to her who said before the play that she “heard about it in the Times.” For all of Rosie and her friends’ opining, the play itself is more of a straight description, a mirror for those in on the joke, more “on-the-nose” and naturalistic than other popular satires of the coastal elite. There is something crass about these inside jokes much the same way there is something crass about the second act of Slave Play, when large swaths of the crowd were snapping and nodding in assent to politically correct therapy sessions. D said Afters didn’t “tell you how to feel” and I agree that’s an exceedingly rare and vital thing in an artwork, along with ambition and other virtues of the play. Of the many things one can say about the scene, it’s no longer true that it hasn’t produced any art. Only time will tell if their aesthetic principles apply outside the particular context of the “dumbest time in human history,” as a character in the first play famously declares. For now, it’s possible the play doesn’t have to tell you how to feel because it already knows how you feel, on account of your showing up in the first place. As if how to feel is in the air now, subsumed by the culture, at least in the neighborhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn with especially egregious rent. Come to think of it, we are never told the cross streets of Rosie’s apartment.
What’s next for Dimes Square, now that the party’s over? According to one girl in Afters, the new thing is to convince a man not merely to pay rent but to buy her an apartment – perhaps in one of the planned luxury developments, and hopefully a safe radius from the future construction site for the “world’s tallest jail.” Dimes Square was reviewed everywhere while Afters seems to have passed unnoticed, which probably means it’s really good, yet here I am writing in the style of dime-store Crumps, having finally worked up the courage for my own competitive striving performative auto fictional grift, to use a few of the epithets thrown around in Afters, hoping like everyone who writes about a concrete triangle in Chinatown that it will garner enough attention on the internet to earn me a few hours of praise and harassment, a little slice of the scene I can’t seem to give up on.