What Is Theater's Place In The Digital World? Matthew Gasda Has The Answer

Matthew Gasda can teach creatives of any ilk an important lesson: to be successful as an artist, you’ve got to produce your work. The Brooklyn-based playwright has no illusions about the art form in which he labors, stating, “Mainstream theatre [has become] unbearably safe, boring and ideological.” Over the course of our conversations that happened after a few readings of a play he’s developing, Zoomers, I got a sense of his frustration with the decline of American theatre. Still, his strivings, as evidenced in the community he’s building at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, where he shows his plays and teaches, paint a picture of a hopeful, innovative, and inspired artist actively working towards making theatre relevant to a new generation.

Theatre is a hard sell these days, even to fellow creatives and members of the literati. In Gasda’s Substack, Novalis, he writes: “Theater is divisive because of what it has to do: allow for impossible conversations without airing dirty laundry—gossip about humanity without gossiping about humans.” His reckoning with the form at large is reminiscent of other theatre artists and playwrights like Antonin Artaud, who was famously rejected by André Breton, and other French surrealists who decried theatre as a pedestrian and lower art form relative to visual art and poetry. Gasda, like Artaud, succeeds in elevating the art form by making performances more intimate and blurring the line between audience member and performer. He involves audiences in the ruse that is live performance, using inclusion in a scene as bait for the clout chaser in all of us.