All the world’s a stage: Matthew Gasda brings living room theater to Greenpoint

GREENPOINT — In living rooms across Brooklyn, people barrel towards each other, like particles in an accelerator. They collide and spin apart, in directions hard to predict… Understandings emerge, and where understanding isn’t possible, a recognition of the human condition…

Sorry, what? I’m talking about independent theater. I’m talking about such independent theater that it makes other users of the term seem the first wave, sponsored by Big Oil and embezzlers. At the heart of the DIY revival is Matthew Gasda’s Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, where he’s the playwright-in-residence.

With over a dozen plays to his name, including an underground hit, Gasda’s rise to fame seems tied in part to skillfully preserving the feeling of a time and a place… and uncorking it at the exact right moment. Dimes Square premiered during the cultural lull of the pandemic in makeshift spaces, profiling a certain scene concentrated around keystone haunts in Chinatown. It caught the mainstream media’s eye and sold out repeatedly. It’s now been published, along with three other plays: Quartet, Minotaur and Berlin Story.

Born and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Gasda liked sports (the Eagles) and read widely (Gaddis, Joyce, Ashbery). He graduated with a philosophy degree from Syracuse, where he played keyboards and sang in a band called Preludes, a band I dug up because that’s what reporters do, and found mesmerizing. Their sound is kind of a rapturous slowcore, reminiscent of the emotional palates we had before the information age and its associated numbing solutions. In-person, Gasda is laidback and soft-spoken. He carries a burner-looking flip phone and is wary of the effect of technology on his work. He wages the war…