Long review of Matthew Gasda's new play The Last Days of Downtown (CTR, April 2026), read as a contemporary adaptation of Euripides' Bacchae.
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Matthew Gasda's new play The Last Days of Downtown is on at CTR through spring 2026. I saw it on Sunday April 19th.
There's a moment about halfway through The Last Days of Downtown where one of the actors breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge that @neoliberalhell is in the audience. It’s very funny. @neoliberalhell (a post-left micro-celebrity who has, against all odds, somehow stayed on the left) is in fact in the audience.
After which the play keeps going, tout suite. It’s just one of many shoutouts.
Gasda's 2015 adaptation of Euripides was commissioned by SUNY Oswego and went to the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Gasda has written the Bacchae once. The Last Days of Downtown is yet another iteration of the same play.
The really radical formal thing about this play is that the subtext is the over-text. Gasda is well aware of Pinter and he couldn’t care less about that guy. In Last Days, there's no gap between what gets said and what gets meant. There's no iceberg under the line.
"I want to come across as a sophisticated urban bisexual." "I'm just free-associating." "You're a social masochist Terry, you're addicted; you invite it unconsciously."
That last one is being said to Terry, by his friends, at his fortieth birthday party. It's diagnostic. The therapy-speak and the dialogue have become the same speak. The closest thing I can compare it to is Woody Allen, if you could imagine the captions underneath the Annie Hall clips speaking.
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.
So when Bob, as Chris, says "I'm just free-associating," he's naming the law.
OK so under all of this verbal possession there's actually one argument the play keeps coming back to, and it's the same argument 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 whole play is structurally about aesthetics versus breeding, and the non-competition between the two. There's a sterility in the manner of Eliot's Waste Land concealed underneath an apparent fecundity that turns out, when you look at it, to just be 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 eugenicist weirdos who proposition women on "high verbal IQ" grounds. The artist class is sterile and Substacks itself. Both sides have lost the plot. "You will be in Cleveland breeding" is delivered as a curse, a fate worse than death — but the alternative that Gasda depicts isn't life.
Nicole Sollazzo, as the celebrated female writer, is the play's purest figure of all this. 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 she's also a delight to watch. Sollazzo plays her with a lit-from-within self-possession that the male characters visibly resent and visibly need. She's the golden calf of what they cannot be.
The Houellebecq inheritance is unmistakable here. The wickedness and loneliness of his sentiments about phones, about nations of the internet age. Dardan, who you'd expect to be the play's unshakeable foreigner-ironist, isn't exempt either. He gets caught in the compulsive speech too, repeating "fact-check true, fact-check true" as a stim.
The sexual economy of this play is where the Bacchae logic becomes most visible. The aging millennial men (Victor most of all) are being tortured by what amounts to a chorus of nymphettes torturing the worst iterations of themselves.
They are, spiritually, cucked by lesbians. "No one will fuck me." The indignity of the admission is the humiliation ritual the Dionysian demands. Pentheus has to be torn apart. But before that Pentheus has to admit he wants it.
But here's the thing the play does, and I'm not sure how deliberate it is. The women retain their sexual energy even as they're being sexualized and discussed and surveilled. The subtext, in their case, hasn't been moved to the surface. It's been moved elsewhere.
Mia, Cleo, Iris, Jessie, Genevieve. The collapse of subtext-into-over-text that's been engineered for the men is preserved, intact, for the women. They are other to the structure.
Gasda's downtown men have thoughts which are audible, broadcast, on stage. The women's are not. The structure of the female unconscious, in this play, gets preserved as a kind of theological remainder — the one place where meaning still resists meaning.
In Euripides, the chorus isn't separate from the polis, it is the polis, displaced and made strange.
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 on stage. Stay in New York after the pandemic. Stay after the election. Stay after whatever last excuse for staying expired.
When Victor delivers his great 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.” The audience is the chorus is the polis is the doomed.
Dionysian frenzy in Euripides isn't an absence of mind, it's a surplus of mind. The maenads aren't unconscious, they're way too conscious, the god has poured himself into them and they can't hold him.
Talking has become the symptom of a possession everyone tries to exorcise by talking more. Post-2020 downtown is at maximum semiotic differentiation. Every vibe has a name, every name has a discourse, every discourse has a Discord.
Dardan (Uliks Fehmiu, recently in the Sundance short Don’t Tell Mama) makes this play more than just another Brooklyn-people-doing-drugs play. There’s a strange moment as he enters in Scene 6 — the audience hushes. They look at him as if they've all walked into a foreign-language film. A subtitle bar appears in the bottom of everyone's brain.
But Dardan is also lampooned. The idolised European Other that downtown New Yorkers love to fetishise (the Žižek, the Knausgård, the Houellebecq) gets exposed as just as ridiculous, just as worthy of mockery, as everyone else.
Dardan 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. "That I write out of provocation and not out of genuine belonging." He delivers this line about himself in the same compulsive over-articulate register as everyone else in the room.
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 piss in the real bathroom. Calla Selicious, in Scene Six, just leaves the stage and uses the actual bathroom of the actual loft. The plumbing is made transparent. The fourth wall in this case isn't broken so much as hydraulically traversed.
Everyone in this play is, in some sense, anal-expulsive. 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. The bidet line (Calla Selicious) caps the bit: "I have to install a bidet in my house, no matter the cost — and then I found of the cost.”
The Fellini ending. Scene Eight, the morning after, in Terry's wrecked apartment with Ashley and Avery. Terry starts talking about the last scene of 8½, that great closing carnival in which Guido's whole life parades around him in white. As he describes it, the strains of Nino Rota's score start drifting in from outside the world of the play. The music isn't the play's music. It's the music of the thing Terry is remembering.
A character's desire (for a final image, for a last shot that could be passed on into the future as some kind of pure symbol) punctures the play's surface. This is the most Dionysian moment in the whole play and also the least insane. The god leaves quietly.
"Should we go to Balthazar?" "Yeah that'd be great." "I'm fucking starving." Steak frites, baby. Lights down.
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, costume designer (apparently a Depop guy Gasda found off the street whose sartorial sense lends the production a kind of materiality, or some such bullshit) deserves singling out because the costuming is amazing. The cast looks like the audience. This is harder than it sounds. Most plays about downtown miss the costuming by a quarter-inch and lose the whole thing. Engstrom doesn’t miss.
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.
Sofia Whetstone's work as Associate Director. Her background in film is legible immediately. The crowded scenes are composed as tableaux, with the quality of a widescreen ensemble shot. In one frame from the production photographs, the eye roams the frame 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.
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.
