The Sordid Scene
A thirty-something indie rocker gallantly holds the hair back for his much younger girlfriend as she rails a line of coke off the coffee table in the opening moments of Matthew Gasda’s gleeful, scathing play Dimes Square. The pair flirt, bicker, talk about sex, whine about their friends, and nearly break up, all before the afterparty arrives—the room filling up with a roiling, rotating crew of writers, models, hangers-on, film makers, and try-hards. Over the following ninety minutes, this clan of motley frenemies do blow, drink whiskey, engage in awkward sexual encounters, and ruthlessly neg each other’s artistic pursuits.
Dimes Square the play takes place in a loft in Dimes Square, a micro-neighborhood in New York City squished between Chinatown and the Lower East Side and made infamous for its lockdown rules-flouting partying and transgressive, some say reactionary, upstart media scene. Originally performed over the course of 2022 at various city lofts and squats, with no vax passes or masks required, the first production sold out every show. Celebrities, hipsters, authors, tastemakers (and possibly Barack Obama’s daughter?) all came out to see it. Eventually the play, like the podcast Red Scare and the literary journal Drunken Canal, became a part of the lore of the downtown scene in which it was set. It is now in revival at The Brooklyn Center for Theater Research.
The show’s pace is fast and hard and, as a playwright, Gasda rarely lets the foot off the pedal. These characters wallop each other in a cascading deluge of psychobabble, dirty talk, name-dropping, self-pity, passive aggression, actual aggression, and publishing world shop talk. Gasda is a master of the perfectly honed insult (“This person is cool, but like, they’re just a chain of references”) and the devastatingly funny aside (“I’m kinda dating this couple right now’”). His characters are merciless, horny blobs of unbridled need fueled by nose candy and fernet, and soundtracked by Bob Dylan’s most annoying record.
A true ensemble piece, the main character of Dimes Square is the afterparty itself—referred to multiple times with delightful banality as “the scene.” It feels almost unfair to point out specific actors. That said, both Dan Blick and Sean Lynch’s performances feel particularly lived in. As Terry, a self-serious sad sack documentarian, Lynch drapes himself across the furniture, sometimes cradling his own head in his hands or strutting pompously across the room to thumb through a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions, somberness his favored pose. Dan Blick brings a wolfish intensity to Stefan, playing the up-and-coming novelist with dog-eat-dog virility. Colette Gsell surprises as an ingenue, Ashley, who takes an unsettling heel turn. Cosima Gardey’s performance as the model Olivia was somewhat uneven on the night I saw the show, but when it clicked, she coupled the oblivious vacuousness of the role with a gentle, probing kindness that made her one of the play’s more weirdly riveting characters.
The production has the rambling, shambolic quality of a late-night party, and this looseness occasionally works against the show (which is directed by the playwright). There are moments when the timing of zingers just slightly misses the mark, and the emotional stakes within scenes occasionally seem to waver. That said, the looseness of the direction works in an immersive sense. The shaggy rhythm of the play will feel familiar to anyone who has ever stayed up until sunrise with a rowdy group of friends. In this way, watching the play feels like hanging out.
Dimes Square’s main focus is on the tenuous transactional relationships that pass as friendships between this particular group of strivers. This idea is taken to extremes. Sex in this show is performed either to get a job or to get one over on a rival. Filmmaking is a means to avenge a cuckolding. Books are written purely to achieve higher status in niche New York professional peer groups. In this way, the play is a vicious expression of late-stage techno-capitalism. As disaster befalls the state, members of “the scene” put all their focus on securing the goods for themselves. The play is a feeding frenzy of wounded New York media people eating their own. As the infrastructure that could once have supported their professional careers disappears into free downloadable apps on their iPhones, the importance of social cachet, of heroic drug intake, and of sex-based power plays inflates to the level of absurdity. So they rave on.
The ensemble does a wonderful job playing characters who blur the line between play-acting as terrible people and then saying and doing actual terrible things. “Being a good guy or whatever is my grift,” the amiable Klay puts it. But they are fun to be around. When they aren’t breaking down in tears on the subway, these people are having a pretty great time they won’t necessarily remember. The play also reminds us of the joys of clannish tribalism. These characters subsume their identities to the group. When someone leaves, someone else slides into their role, fills up the emotional space recently vacated. There is something against the grain about this bold collectivism, and one of the show’s strengths is its unwillingness to finger wag its characters or tell the audience how we should feel about them. There is no moral to this story. Disaster can be invigorating. Insults can be hilarious. No lessons will be learned. As the world burns, the getters gonna get. Inevitably, “the scene” will explode. As one hanger-on puts it, “This whole group of people is not going to be hanging out in a year, let alone six months. It’s rotting.” In the likely event that statement is true, we’re lucky we get a chance to gawk at them for an evening from the safe distance of our seats.
