On Matthew Gasda's Zoomers

Plays That Strain to Break Free From Narcissism

Dear Republic,

Little by little, The Republic of Letters finds itself doing more book reviews — as in crying addict

Denise S. Robbins

’ piece on Matthew Gasda’s play collection.

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ON MATTHEW GASDA’S ZOOMERS

Matthew Gasda is interested in “strange loops.”

This is the term cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter coined in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, to describe self-referential systems that move beyond themselves while staying on the same plane. The classic example is someone thinking about themselves. If you are thinking about yourself, you are necessarily more than the thing you are thinking about, and yet, it’s still you. Strange recursive loops like these, Hofstadter says, are where consciousness comes from. Where souls come from.

Hofstadter is quoted in the preface to one of Gasda’s plays in his latest play collection, Zoomers and Other Plays—published October 16 from Bloomsbury—but even without this quote, the influence of Hofstadter’s work would be clear, because Gasda’s characters simply can’t stop talking about themselves, and they also can’t stop talking about how important it is to talk about themselves (and, if they really tried, they’d probably talk about talking about talking about themselves). And they all want to break free of something, and you feel they almost can, but they end up right back where they started.

This idea is most poetically portrayed in Morning Journal, which is about different sets of people living in one apartment over several years. It starts and ends with Hazel and Celine, two frenemies who both love the same man. Hazel is asking Celine to watch her house and cat, and Celine is dating Hazel’s ex-boyfriend, a relationship Hazel actually encouraged—it comes to light quickly—to keep him close (Hazel’s still in love with him). “I was hoping you would fuck him in my bed. And not wash the sheets,” she says. “And can you write in the journal while I’m gone? Like you’re me.” We never learn if Celine completes the former request—she responds with revulsion—but in the end we learn she fulfills the latter.

Hazel and Celine open and end the play, but in between, we get several sets of characters going through their own personal dramas. Sometimes these characters, who don’t know each other, go through eerily similar circumstances. Two of them repeat the same anecdote verbatim about standing on the fire escape for “like two hours” in the cold, in a state of “pre-crying where my mind was crying but my body couldn’t do anything—”

One of the characters concludes this anecdote by saying “I missed him so much.” The other: “Then I called my therapist.”

The characters are mirrors of one another, even if their circumstances are vastly different. This mirroring is lampshaded by Abby, a concert pianist, discussing Bach: “Sometimes things can be the same and yet different and unexpected… it’s the same sheet music, but things are changing inside the sameness.”

And this is a microcosm of the plays writ large, in which several characters are distorted versions of each other. They’re all over-therapized and full of drugs and sex and lust and angst and, above all, are crippled with destructive self-consciousness.

(Also, and maybe this is my Midwest speaking, but lots of them are incredibly mean. More on that later.)

The titular play, Zoomers, similarly starts and ends with mirror images. Three roommates play Super Smash Bros. and complain about their love lives. The female roommate is replaced midway through, and various love interests enter and exit the scene, with various levels of drama, but it ends the same way it begins, in an uneasy truce, smoking weed and playing Smash. It is probably the most universal of the plays in this collection, as in, I’ve met these people, I know them, whereas I can’t say the same of the other plays.

One-Winged Dove is the simplest in form, involving just four characters: one messy writer, his editor, his hyper-competent girlfriend, and his brother. The writer, Sam, has just sold a novel and is going through some sort of mental breakdown, and forces his editor to come to his home and help. By “help” he means putting on records, and listening to him complain about her proposed cuts. “This book is life and death for me,” he moans. He’s a temporarily sober alcoholic and desperate for a drink, trying to convince his editor that he needs whiskey to complete the edits she wants. She tries to calm him down with Walt Whitman poems but gives in to his demands. Then we cut to the girlfriend and brother in the same apartment, days later, worried sick because he’s missing and his phone is off. She’s sure he’s dead. His brother tells her Sam’s just on a drinking bender. He’s familiar with this routine. At the end of the play, we hear Sam’s keys in the door. He’s returning home, presumably to repeat the cycle. (Sorry for the small spoiler, but it also felt inevitable. And this is not a story about the tragedy of death but the tragedy of life, and knowing the ending doesn’t make the play itself any less interesting.)

The final play, Afters, is the least memorable. As in, I read it from beginning to end and did not remember what happened, other than that it featured some repeat characters from Gasda’s earlier hit, Dimes Square, which was apparently about artists talking about art (I intentionally didn’t read it, wanting to read these plays as standing on their own); this sequel also features artists talking about art. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyable; it was often hilarious, like one character seriously wondering aloud, “Has anyone ever noticed how the phrases ‘cum for me’ and ‘comfort me’ are phonetically similar?” But there were twelve different characters and a throughline was hard to find. Perhaps that was the point: they’re all searching for something and unable to find it. They switch between being in love with themselves and their lives and hating it all, hoping to escape. But those are all things they talk about, not things they do. They lie about snorting cocaine and say they should stop and they keep snorting it anyway. One character says, “This city is alternately... strangely ludicrous... and bewitchingly beautiful.” It’s this uncertainty that feeds the cycle of addiction. Each of them are dreaming of that fleeting moment when things are beautiful again. Until then, they’re stuck in an apartment they call “The Chapel” (at least until the main character’s boyfriend kicks them out). They’re torn between the logical wish to escape and the desire to stretch the moment as long as possible, which is why people end up staying up until seven o’clock the next morning, so each day can last forever.

Failure to escape is a common theme in these plays. The play One-Winged Dove evokes this feeling in the very title, with an image of a bird trying to fly and failing, merely flapping around in a circle. But perhaps the title refers to something else? The main character references the 1980s film Wings of Desire, which is about immortal angels in Berlin just before the Wall fell. The angels are listening to human thoughts, but unable to participate, until the main angel character chooses to fall himself, down to Earth to become mortal, so he can be with the woman he loves. Maybe the title refers to both. The characters are trying and failing to escape their cycles, like a dove unable to fly; it feels, at times, like the only opportunity they have to change their situation is to fall, like the angel. “I think you’re tempted by the idea of ruining things before they let you down,” Sam’s editor says. “It feels so good,” he responds.

Something else that stands out in these stories is just how overly aware the characters are. Too aware. “This is the only moment where I think I’ve ever considered you a friend,” Hazel says to her housesitter after they get into a fight. “I think I’m hurt by this,” says a different character in a different play, and her date responds, “Because I’m pushing you away.”

The horrible irony is that, for all these characters’ supposed self-awareness, there is something fundamental they lack: awareness of other humans. And they are sort of aware of this lack of awareness. “You know the people around you, including myself, have inner lives, right? And that they’re not just ghosts hazily floating around your brain?” They can see each other’s faults, but not their own. They feel emboldened to be absolutely horrible to each other, then wonder how they got into a situation where people are absolutely horrible to one another. “What’s good about you Nico?”

Let me bring up a different computer science term: livelock. Like deadlock, but alive, active: Livelock is a state in which separate processes continually change state in response to each other, but neither makes any forward progress. Two people approach each other in a hallway, trying to get to the other side, both with a simple program: “Take one step sideways.” But they take the same step sideways, so their program kicks in again: “Take one step sideways in the opposite direction.” And it continues with both people hopping from foot to foot because neither knows how to end this cycle.

Does self-reference always lead to a failure to escape? According to Gasda’s plays… probably. And yet, as Mike Crumplar states in the afterword there is a “doomed sort of hopefulness” in these plays. Near the beginning of Afters, one character discusses getting swept up into and later escaping a vegan yoga cult, and says: “You can kind of surrender to a mass movement or way of thinking but... there’s still a little flicker of consciousness that doesn’t go away easily... or at all.” This flicker of consciousness, Gasda suggests, can be found in art and beauty. But for most of the characters it remains just that: a flicker.

Only once in the plays does someone step outside themselves. Consider this monologue by certified horrible human being, Hazel, who complained about being forced to play piano as a child, but, during her time away (for her father’s funeral), returned to the piano:

I thought my dad wanted me to be a prodigy, but actually he was preparing me for the moment when he was gone, for when I’d need to finally be born; I know that doesn’t really make any sense, but. He was programming me with those notes so that they might teach me how life begins with something simple, but becomes something complex, gradually. You know, because there’s something in it, the way harmony spins melody out of itself like a turbine, and keeps going. A human being created that, and I could pass it through my brain and my fingers; that insane beauty could be. It could be me.

The play ends shortly after this. Hazel and Celine arrive at a sort of catharsis. It seems that the death of Hazel’s father, combined with her brief return to piano, really did change something in her.

At least, one hopes. It’s hard to know for sure. In the same conversation, Hazel admits something terrible, and it’s unclear whether such an admission does more harm or good.

We’re introduced to characters stuck in a purgatory of their own making, and it’s interesting to watch them bring each other down, like rubbernecking at a car wreck. When reading the plays, I sometimes thought of Sophocles, king of Greek tragedy. You are thrust immediately into the worst and most dramatic moments of people’s lives. This is probably how they consider themselves, as stars in their own tragedies. They are their own worst enemies, and they know this—but they don’t know how this knowledge will help them.

Even the worst of people have a flicker of consciousness, Gasda’s characters show—but consciousness is not enough. These characters need something more to escape their destructive self-referential loops. And some of them try to, and all of them yearn to. But they don’t succeed. Hazel might, but her ending is ambiguous.

These plays were fun to read, and they opened my eyes to the strange destructive tendencies of the elusive “Dimes Square” scene, if tangentially and imperfectly. And I can imagine seeing them in person would be exciting, being in the same physical space as others who are hoping to push art forward. But what I wanted, and what I’m not sure I found, was for the characters in these plays truly to break free from themselves. Maybe that’ll come in the sequel to the sequel. Or maybe I’ll keep hoping and nothing will change. Maybe…

Denise S. Robbins is the author of The Unmapping. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer whose stories have appeared in literary journals including The Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast, and many more. She writes on Substack about noticing things.