‘The Last Days of Downtown’ Bids Goodbye to Dimes Square — and All That

Some plays transport the viewer to parts unknown. “The Last Days of Downtown,” on the other hand, drills down into how some of us live now. This production, written and directed by Matthew Gasda, cuts close to the bone of the south of 14th Street set that has for the past half decade clustered around a stretch of Canal, Division, and Essex Streets known as “Dimes Square.” Mr. Gasda is the bard of this below-Bowery micro-neighborhood.“The Last Days of Downtown” is an updated “Goodbye to All That” where relentless postures of cool are backlit with loss and the sense of a scene ebbing away. Mr. Gasda, whose previous work includes a collection called “Dimes Square” as well as a roman à clef about OpenAI, works at the cutting edge of the contemporary without being off-puttingly avant-garde. He works the old tools well— dialogue, wit, simple settings and textured feelings.The setting of “The Last Days of Downtown” is also the social mainstay of that milieu — the apartment party. The entire play takes place in one domicile, that of a neurotic filmmaker named Terry who is turning the ominous age of 40. The play’s promotional material explains that it seeks to “stage the terminal phase of New York’s creative class,” and for the young and bright one’s fourth decade is nothing if not adjacent to ancient.A statement released by Mr. Gasda’s Brooklyn Center for Theater Research argues that “cultural exhaustion manifests not as silence but as compulsive eloquence,” and the characters who populate Terry’s apartment across seven brisk scenes are word wizards who would not be out of place in a play written by Oscar Wilde or Tom Stoppard. They quote Cervantes, hum along to Leonard Cohen tracks, and debate the merits of Serbian literary modernism.“Dimes Square” hit a nerve because of its pointillist portrait of a contrarian, Catholic inflected, anti-woke scene that bloomed during Covid-19. In 2022 Vogue called Dimes Square “New York’s neighborhood of the moment,” a resurrection for a corner of the city populated by Jewish ghosts arguing the world in Yiddish and cheap Chinese restaurants slinging dumplings. To this menagerie Mr. Gasda added the Metrograph Theater and Bar Clandestino.“The Last Days of Downtown” is a sequel to “Dime Square”, but this second play concedes that no new sensibility has arisen to succeed the spiky sensibility of the generation that that revolted against pandemic strictures, published its own zines, and founded a pirated radio station — and looked beautiful doing it. This new play acknowledges the ground that has been ceded to the digital — characters reference Raya and Hinge, both dating apps.At one point a character laments that the new fauna downtown “almost make you miss the whores and junkies,” a wistfulness every generation of Gothamites appears destined to feel for itself. One ghost of New York’s past recalled with a shudder is a waiter described “2009 era hipster frozen in amber — like ironic glasses and t-shirt and everything” who even offers — the horror — aioli for a no-doubt grass-fed hamburger of humane extraction.Mr. Gasda takes the details seriously— this is a kind of comedy of manners. One character is rumored to have engaged in a tryst at Basement, a club at Ridgewood with a draconian door policy well-known to those chasing the party through dawn’s break. Terry is urged to smoke a cigarette, but insists he is “good with Zyns.” A musician, Nate, was “extremely cancelled” but is mounting a comeback. Cocaine is more popular than alcohol. The play’s characters struggle in the warrens of early adulthood. One declares “I just wanna make art in my bedroom and have fun sometimes.” Decisions about relationships — more often than not inconclusive — are made while waiting for Ubers. One affluent girl, Genevieve, asks an attractive but loutish actor, Michael, “were you like this before you arrived in New York or did New York do this to you?” He acknowledges that the “city accelerated things.”Michael’s new play — he calls it “a thing,” in classic Gen-Z and Millennial fashion— is staged at “Greenpoint, in this kinda of like commercial loft space.” Mr. Gasda’s collection of “actors, writers, crypto guys, scene girls, exes, and hangers-on” have their own geography. As he wrote in Air Mail in 2022, Dimes Square “is not a square, by the way—it’s a feeling.” One imagines Edna St. Vincent Milay nodding from the Greenwich Village of the 1920’s.“The Last Days of Downtown” nods with mock seriousness to the “nepo baby revolution” and similar flotsam of meme driven viral culture. One character recalls being cast by a “non-binary drug dealer” in a short film that was a “biracial gay love story set during the Bataclan mass shooting.” It was screened at the New Ohio on Christopher Street, but “you can watch it on Vimeo.” The audience laughed at this — and at themselves.That laughter, though, points to an underlying ache for a better downtown. One character reflects that “Leonard [Cohen] and [Bob] Dylan were so lucky to exist in an era where you go through this really like, ruinous relationship and write a breakup song and ultimately have the song be the thing that matters to people.” Now — or was it ever and always this way? — “People only care about the art if it’s connected to their personal or social lives.”

‘The Last Days of Downtown’ Bids Goodbye to Dimes Square — and All That

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