The Bacchae of Balthazar

A review of Matthew Gasda's The Last Days of Downtown at the Center for Theatre Research, co-directed by Sofia Whetstone. The third and final installment of the Dimes Square trilogy, and a downtown New York Bacchae where subtext is over-text.

The Last Days of Downtown

By Matthew Gasda
‍Center for Theatre Research
‍Directed by Matthew Gasda
Co-directed by Sofia Whetstone

Reviewed by Aubrey Wang

Billed by Gasda himself as "a night that might be the end of an era," The Last Days of Downtown is the third and final installment of his Dimes Square trilogy. It is the kind of play that knows exactly where it is and exactly when — an X-ray of post-pandemic Brooklyn that is dense, learned, at once celebratory and damning, and manically funny.

Disclosure: I worked on this production as a stagehand and a communications intern. I spent most of the run in the landing outside the theatre sending out job applications and plying latecomers with goon, ducking in between acts to bump in the set, swap in the cold prop pizza, and take out the trash. None of which amounted to creative authority. If there is any partiality, it comes from having witnessed all of the work behind the scenes.

Another Iteration of The Bacchae

Gasda's 2015 adaptation of Euripides was commissioned by SUNY Oswego and went to the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, and it appears to still be in stock on Amazon. Officially, that is the one Bacchae on his record.

Gasda has spoken often about the writer's obligation to leave a subject alone once it has been worked out. "You can tell," he told BOMB Magazine in 2023, "when writers have been mining the same vein for too long. I just know it's time to move on to something else." The argument of this review is that he has not yet moved on, and is right not to — that The Last Days of Downtown is the most fully developed iteration of the same play he has produced to date.

The Audience As Polis

In Euripides, the chorus is not separate from the polis; it is the polis, displaced and made strange. Gasda has framed his relationship to his own subject in similar terms. Speaking to Office Magazine around the 2024 Dimes Square revival, he described his evolving position:

"I'm not directing a play that feels like it's part of the scene anymore, but one that's outside of it. One that we can approach artistically and professionally."

The audience at The Last Days of Downtown is a room full of people who have made the same set of decisions as the characters onstage. Stay in New York after the pandemic. Stay after the election. The audience is the chorus is the polis is the doomed.

The kind of recursive work that CTR is known for producing definitely hit home that night, and the laughter that follows is the laughter of people seen — though, as Gasda has noted elsewhere, the recognition cuts both ways.

‍"I've had people walk out," he told Digital Party. "They felt personally attacked, when I hadn't seen them in years. I've had people claim I took something from them."

Take Jessie (played by West Coast native Annabel Boardman), fumbling toward a self-description:

"I don't want to come off as needy; um — I want to come off as like… a sophisticated urban bisexual."

The line gets laughs every time because the play has caught, faithfully, how a certain kind of New Yorker actually thinks — identity assembled in real time out of available adjectives, the unconscious narrated as it happens. But the neurosis that the play capturess runs deeper than the gag. At points it tips past comedy into schizophrenic in a precise sense.

Language becomes hyper-concrete, autoerotic, organ-like. Speech no longer refers. Speech is.

Terry's monologue about disgrace "in the full theological meaning of the word"; Victor declaiming his MFA bona fides; Salty narrating his Adderall dose. This is subtext having been pre-abolished, in advance, before the play started. The interiority that the nineteenth-century novel handled through free indirect discourse — narratorial voice merging with a character's thoughts — has been de-internalized and given back to the actors as lines.

Dionysian frenzy in Euripides is not an absence of mind but a surplus of mind. Talking becomes the symptom of a possession everyone tries to exorcise by talking more. Gasda stages this with extraordinary precision.

Post-2020 downtown is at maximum semiotic differentiation. Every vibe has a name, every name has a discourse, every discourse has a Discord.

Aesthetics vs. Breeding

The play keeps returning to a single question, and it is the same one as the Bacchae: what is the relationship between aesthetic life and biological life? Between art and reproduction? Between the polis and the household, between the menagerie and the ménage?

The Last Days of Downtown is structurally about aesthetics versus breeding, and the non-competition between the two. There is a sterility out of Eliot's Waste Land hidden beneath an apparent fecundity that reveals itself, on inspection, as a Dionysian orgy of in-references — Pozzo and Lucky for the internet age.

Breeding and not-breeding are equally suspect. The Sovereign House crowd are eugenicists who proposition women on "high verbal IQ" grounds. The artist class is sterile and Substacks itself. Both sides have lost the plot.

When Victor delivers his aria of generational grievance, the line is aimed past the actors, into the house.

"None of you will be here in seven years: you won't be in New York City. You'll be living in Cleveland. Breeding."

"You will be in Cleveland breeding" is delivered as a curse, a fate worse than death; except the alternative Gasda depicts isn't life either, and the play pulls no punches. The Houellebecq inheritance is everywhere — the wickedness and the loneliness of his feeling about phones, about the nations of the internet age.

The gap between portrait and prescription is one Gasda has made explicit. "My plays," he told Digital Party in 2023, "are what I don't want my life to become." Neither the eugenicist camp nor the Substack camp are endorsed.

Iris (played by Nicole Sollazzo) as the celebrated female writer, is an absolute goddess of the longhouse. She's published a chapbook. She is pathologized by the men around her for refusing to breed. She's perhaps the butt of male ressentiment but onstage she's a delight to watch. Sollazzo plays her with a lit-from-within self-possession that the male characters visibly resent and visibly need.

The Women Remain Opaque

The sexual economy of the play is where the Bacchae logic shows clearest. The aging millennial men (Victor most of all) are tortured by what amounts to a chorus of nymphs parroting the worst iterations of those same men back at them. The women's indifference becomes its own humiliation ritual.

"No one will fuck me," Victor admits,

and the Dionysian demands precisely that admission. Pentheus has to be torn apart. But first he has to admit he wants it.

What is most striking about the play's treatment of its women — and this almost certainly bears the imprint of Sofia Whetstone's co-direction — is that they keep their sexual energy even as they are sexualised, discussed and surveilled.

The structure of the female unconscious, in this play, survives as a kind of theological remainder. Gasda's downtown men have thoughts that are audible, broadcast, onstage. The women's are not.

The collapse of subtext-into-over-text engineered for the men is kept intact for the women. They are other to the structure, and it's a credit to the company's unique brand of post-feminism.

A Few Shoutouts

Calla Selicious, in Scene Six, just leaves the stage and uses the actual bathroom of the actual loft. The apartment's real plumbing being injected into the play's fictional space produces an estrangement where it stops being clear what's internal where, what's external, who's pissing on whom. Selicious caps the bit with a perfectly timed punchline: "I have to install a bidet in my house, no matter the cost — and then I found of the cost.”

H.G. Welp's score is terrific. Leonard Cohen drifting against classical, period markers against atemporal swells, the Fellini 8½ music breaking through the diegesis at the end. The schizophrenia of the score is the schizophrenia of the play's relationship to time. Is this 2009? Is this 2026? Is it the morning after the Trump election or the night before the pandemic? The music doesn't say.

‍Nick Walther is Charlie Chaplin in a leather jacket. A terrific shaggy archetype of the aging millennial, all body before mouth. In a play this verbal his physicality is a relief and also a structural necessity.

Michael Berry plays Michael as eccentric, bespectacled, intermittently foaming at the mouth. Rumour is Gasda told him to "just play yourself" and this has turned out to be a great piece of direction. A performance that could be acting or could be documentary. You can't tell, and the not-being-able-to-tell is the whole experience.

Claire Banse plays an annoyingly pretty character giving full Marnie-from-Girls energy, which is not a put-down. Marnie is genuinely difficult to play because she's written from inside a self-image almost no actor can sustain. Banse sustains it.

Quinn Engstrom, apparently a Depop find of Gasda's whose sartorial sense lends the production a kind of material density — earns the singling-out. The costumes say it all. The cast looks like the audience.

Sofia Whetstone's work as Associate Director. Her background in film is apparent immediately. The crowded scenes are composed as tableaux, with the quality of a widescreen ensemble shot. The eye roams the stage the way it does in an Altman or Anderson composition. That is Whetstone's blocking: visual storytelling, a trained eye for the kind of dense, simultaneous composition that theatre usually leaves to film.

Dardan Nikolić as the European Other

Dardan (Uliks Fehmiu, recently in the Sundance short Don't Tell Mama) is from Peć, an Albanian Catholic writing in Serbian, beefing with a Slavic-languages professor from Columbia who has accused him of being a tourist in the language. The injection of a foreigner as a way to get the polis to reorient itself is lifted directly out of the Bacchae: Dionysus arrives in Thebes as a stranger from Lydia, and the city has to reckon with him or come apart. This is one of the play's strongest moves.

What is most rewarding about Dardan as a figure is that Gasda refuses to let him be the play's exception. The idolised European Other downtown New Yorkers love to fetishise (the Žižek, the Knausgård, the Houellebecq) turns out just as ridiculous, just as mockable, as everyone else.

His invocation of "Augustine, Dante," paired with Mia’s "Pop! Six! Squish! Uh-uh! Cicero! Lipschitz!" from Chicago, makes the joke explicit. The eclecticism of the present collapses every value system. The Western canon is rendered into noise. Dardan is, structurally, Pozzo to Chris's Lucky, or Lucky to Chris's Pozzo. Either way, we are in late stage, very late, comedy.

The full cast: Annabel Boardman, Aris Katafygiotis, Bob Laine, Calla Selicious, Claire Banse, Colette Gsell, Eowyn Young, George Olesky, Jonah Howell, Meg Spectre, Michael Berry, Nick Walther, Nicole Sollazzo, Paul Weintrob, Shamar James, and Uliks Fehmiu. Co-direction by Sofia Whetstone, stage management by Julia Levine.

The Last Days of Downtown, written and directed by Matthew Gasda. Performance reviewed: Sunday, April 19, 2026.