The Dumbest Time in Human History: Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square

The Dumbest Time in Human History: A Review of Dimes Square by Matthew Gasda
in Dimes Square & Other Plays, Applause Books, 2022; $22.95, 284 pp.

We are living through the dumbest time in human history.” Matthew Gasda’s 2022 play Dimes Square begins and ends with this dire proclamation. How can we evaluate whether such a claim is true? What would be the symptoms of a period of unprecedented stupidity, and are they incurable? Through his drama’s implications, Gasda proposes that such a moment—our moment—is not one in which the truth is unknown but rather is evacuated of any capacity to compel action or conversion.

Dimes Square is set within the eponymous neighborhood of New York, which Christian Lorentzen’s foreword describes as “a corner in Manhattan where Canal Street meets Essex Street and the Lower East Side shades into Chinatown . . . the last refuge in a downtown that had become hopelessly touristic, overrun by New York University, and generally uncool, or at least not as much fun as it used to be.” The play’s dramatis personae—twenty-something musicians, artists, filmmakers, fashionistas, and think-piece churners who gather in an artsy Chinatown apartment to do drugs, rounded out by a pair of middle-aged hangers-on from the city’s literary scene—certainly share a fatalistic mentality. Here is a group of people whose little corner of the world threatens at any moment to sink irrevocably into the mire of corporate pseudo-creativity, influencer homogeneity, and podcasted drivel.

But beyond the comically grim resignation of musicians playing on a sinking ship, there is nothing keeping Gasda’s characters together other than a mutual love of cocaine, no center around which an authentic culture could form. Everyone simultaneously hates and is having sex with each other, a cycle of loathing and objectification that inevitably turns one in on oneself.

Nothing life-altering happens in the play. Character arcs are straight lines. The pathetic Klay, for example, after spending the entire play defending Stefan—a sociopathic writer whose novel is being adapted by Netflix—as a literary genius despite Stefan’s open disgust with and detraction of Klay, finally recognizes Stefan explicitly as a diabolical figure yet seemingly remains under his thrall. The wounds these people have inflicted on each other and themselves constantly threaten to break out into lasting consequences, but never do.

This lack of internal change parallels and contrasts Gasda’s other plays contained in the collection that features Dimes Square. These other stories all feature some moment of revelation that substantially changes the dynamics of the relationships between their characters, but this revelation can either effect a serious transformation of the self, as in Minotaur, or can be seemingly passed by altogether, as in Quartet. As one of the leads of Berlin Story relays having heard from a serial adulterer, “‘the only thing that feels real is what’s happening in the moment, and everything else feels unreal, so it’s really hard for me to conceptualize consequences. I always just do whatever I want to do.’”

But though Dimes Square might be Gasda’s most narratively inconsequential play, what preserves it from triviality (and, more damningly, from being boring) and elevates it to excellence is that, though this may how things are, this is not how they should be. The claim that we are living through the dumbest time in human history is not shallow, defeatist critique but a profound anthropological claim: our time is one which has fundamentally cut itself off from the truth, from the Logos, even though we can feel the pain that this has caused us; indeed, we revel in this pain. We can receive all the pleasure we look for and yet it refuses to fill us.

Gasda’s young people brutally self-flagellate (one character, Rosie, admits to Ashley, a female undergraduate she just met and cannot decide whether or not to seduce, that “I like to convince myself I’m always on the verge of failure, starvation, and death . . . you know, as like motivation. . . . I do this thing where, instead of actually changing my worst habits, I just come up with new justifications for them. . . . Like, all my copes are actively bad for my mental and physical health”). They ask intimate and invasive questions whose answers they have no right to know (Rosie immediately follows up her admission by asking Ashley, “what’s your biggest insecurity?”). Yet despite their apparent willingness to bare their souls at the drop of a hat or to glibly self-scrutinize, they betray a complete lack of self-knowledge—instead, exposure serves as self-commodification. Honesty and ironic effacement become social currency. Gasda’s characters wrap themselves in so many layers of irony and meta-reflections about their irony and raw, almost childlike admissions of fear and pain (that are indistinguishable from more irony) that they are a cipher not just to the audience but to themselves, as transparency and humility become a veneer for opaqueness and narcissism, making all authentic relationality impossible. There is no room in Dimes Square’s economy for self-gift, a fact reflected in the shifting sexual relationships throughout the play which are entered into with the assumption of infidelity.

Dimes Square’s protagonists know that something is wrong in themselves and in the world. At times, they’re even able to identify correctly what those problems are: burgeoning filmmaker Terry, for instance, enters a scene distraught after talking to a friend whose newborn son is in intensive care. “It really changes your perspective,” he remarks, “like . . . as much as what’s happening to Greg is terrible and frightening . . . I don’t think he looks at his infant son in the ICU unit and thinks ‘this isn’t it’—just the opposite. He’s filled with love. He’s filled with purpose. But . . . when I look at my life, all I think is, ‘this is not it.’ ‘This can’t be it . . .’ And I think that’s true for most of us.” Later, Rosie, Terry, Klay, and others lament their loss of capacity for “meaningfully dissenting” from “the way things are:” “it’s like, name one emotion that hasn’t been frozen or neutralized by the uninterrupted harshness of monotonous stimulation.”

In both cases, however, the recognition of the loss of something real does not inspire any movement of the soul towards recovery. Terry’s lament is passed by almost entirely; the audience is left unsure as to whether he even means what he’s saying or is simply attempting to recover his status within the group, which his earlier actions in the play have left insecure. The recognition of the loss of true emotion is quickly left behind for a conversation about Klay’s new Twitter hookup. True conversion seems impossible: though the characters know they should turn away from the patterns of behavior they are locked into, they have nothing to turn towards. Rosie, who purportedly has been “really into Catholicism lately,” uses her interest in the faith to turn down Klay’s faltering propositions; this does not prevent her from taking cocaine immediately afterwards or from her sexual interest in Ashley. Faith, like emotional authenticity, is treated as just another posture to adopt for the sake of social utility.

Dimes Square concludes with a damning exchange:

NATE: We’re living through the dumbest time in human history.

TERRY: Let’s try not think about it [sic].

OLIVIA: Yeah. Let’s not . . .

In the microcosm of his one-room setting, Gazda is showing that “the dumbest time in human history” is one in which there is a macrocosmic understanding of a separation of the self and the world from the truth and a total apathy towards this realization. None of Gasda’s characters find a reason to change, though they know they must. What, then, is absent, in the bougie apartments of Chinatown as much as in the world at large, that is preventing these beings made for relationship with the truth from pursuing that communion? Though Gasda does not answer this question explicitly, it is striking that, though the play’s characters are all creatives, beauty is absent in their lives. Perhaps an era of unfathomable ignorance and idiocy is an era of self-inflicted blindness, in which we prefer to fumble around in a darkness of our own making, passing by the Unseen that would fulfill us.