Böcker av Matthew Gasda

Four plays from acclaimed playwright and downtown impresario Matthew Gasda.

Performed in loft apartments, pop-up theatres, and other nontraditional spaces, the 2022 underground hit Dimes Square announced Matthew Gasda as a dramatist of lasting power and impressive range, the theatrical chronicler of a self-chronicling generation. At a time when large, institutional theatres were still finding their post-pandemic footing, this brutal, hilarious portrait of New York City scenesters drew in new and diverse audiences by distilling the zeitgeist of our strange new era-a bitter cocktail of dirtbag politics, casual depravity, and pitiless ambition.Bringing together four of Gasda's most penetrating works-Dimes Square, Quartet, Berlin Story, and Minotaur-this collection surveys a fractured and exhausted cultural-intellectual landscape. From squalid apartments to country estates to hipster bars, these plays give us characters grasping for meaning and human connection in an age of material abundance and moral dislocation. Unflinching, yet marked by exquisite moments of grace, they mark the arrival of a significant dramatic voice.

Matthew Gasda's gorgeously contrapuntal "Orchid Elegy" is a long poem that, like a fugue, moves at once backwards and forwards, joining an impulse towards restless exploration and budding divagation with an instinct for recapitulation. Its 179 brief numbered sections are held both together and apart by a semantic tensegrity achieved through graceful thematic stratification; each structural node experiences the quality of its own solitude in resonance with an elegiac melos unfolding around and through it. These parcels of finitude, "petals like the characters of a play", constantly seek, both in form and in thought, the pattern of a lost Eurydice, even in the shifting, retreating presence of the Other, "for the most important category of beauty is the beauty of that which is lost". The spiral of longing persists through love, hunger and death. Yet, something is accomplished, if not necessarily captured, through the turning of this gyre of "lament and encomium". Tracing and dissecting through the alchemy of metaphor the form of the beloved, "slowly the poem emerges from its secret" and "consciousness emerges"; the poem, or the soul, becomes body, and vice versa, "a shared node transparent -- shining", and with renewed purpose, the elegy of life begins again.