Matthew Gasda – författare

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.

With his breakout hit play Dimes Square, dramatist Matthew Gasda was instantly anointed as the chronicler of the downtown set, a satirist-cum-anthropologist of TikTok microcelebrities, reactionary edgelords, and hapless hangers-on. But what happens after the party’s over, after talent is celebrated, envied, mocked, and memed? Where do you go from there?In Zoomers and Other Plays, Gasda serves up sharply observed, richly ambivalent depictions of a perpetually hungover present. Across these four new plays—One-Winged Dove, Morning Journal, the Dimes Square sequel Afters, and the collection’s title play—spiritual longing and unbearable loss sit uneasily alongside meretriciousness and naked cruelty. Through a generational haze of pot, porn, and video games, Gasda memorably captures our era in all its glory and confusion.

In Futurepast, Gasda argues that technology, privatization, and the culture of narcissism have systematically dismantled the social, spiritual, and physical infrastructure that made human life meaningful—from neighborhoods and churches to tools, rituals, and the capacity for attention itself. The book draws on Lasch, Illich, Mumford, Alexander, and others to show that what we've lost wasn't inevitable collateral damage of progress but the result of specific choices about how we deploy tools, design spaces, and organize economies. The latter half of the book proposes re-enchantment through a return to convivial tools, sacred architecture, village-scale community, and the recovery of practices (from silence to sacrifice to grace) that reconnect us to the body, the land, and each other.

Set in a future that grows more plausible by the day, Stranger Beauty asks what traces will remain after a life has ended.There are novels that describe consciousness and novels that enact it. Stranger Beauty is of the latter. With its narrative spun out of three notebooks, an embedded screenplay, and a final monologue delivered by an AI that has legally consumed a dead man’s life’s work, Matthew Gasda’s formally daring prose carries a powerful emotional resonance.The architecture of the novel is not a stunt. Each section burrows, dreamlike, into a single psyche through repetition, contradiction, and the slow surfacing of things that were never meant to be seen. A marriage as alchemy. A brother lost to madness who emerges as the moral center of everything. And an artificial rendering of a man that speaks with more honesty than the living ever managed to accomplish.An ambitious and original novel, Stranger Beauty is also deeply heartbreaking.