Bøger af Matthew Gasda

Four plays from acclaimed playwright and downtown impresario Matthew Gasda.

A collection of new poetry, fiction, and critical essays compiled by Serpent Club Press, a small, anonymously run press in NYC.Chat GPT described the volume like this: Serpent Club Press, with its air of mystique, has meticulously sifted through a sea of submissions to unearth literary gems that shimmer like stars on a moonlit night. This anthology serves as a testament to their unwavering dedication to the written word, offering a sanctuary for both established and emerging voices to harmonize in a symphony of expression.

"There's no such thing as a simple desire."

An anthology of new writing by humans who write and write well.

In "Minotaur" a family gathers on Christmas Eve. Like all families, this family holds itself together with lies, illusions, cliches. Over the course of a night and day, those lies, illusions, cliches begin to break down under the pressure of repressed truth. This is the basic meaning of the play's title: at the center of every labyrinth, there is a monster (a monster which takes many shapes, including our own).The play is about truth: truth as the overhearing of ourselves, through the encounter with other people; encountering other people, and ourselves, in other people. Letting all the pieces collide against each other, and then being able to--finally--see a sort of pattern in the fast chaotic images.

From the author: "Theater is uniquely alive and at-risk in every moment; or it can be -- if the elements are right. It is uniquely alive in the way that quotidian life is not necessarily alive and at-risk. It is necessary medicine. An ancient medicine. A ritual of self-realization. World literature has produced only a handful of great plays; there is far less first-rate drama than there is poetry or prose. It is a unique and absolutely challenging form: theater demands the crystallization of the way we -- whoever we are at any given point in space time- live, think, breath, feel. Ardor, whether it succeeds or doesn't, is ontologically and linguistically ambitious: it attempts to put pressure on our own sense of ourselves not as beings in the world, but as beings who use language to define the world they live in. More prosaically: Ardor is about us, but it is also open to re-interpretation in the future. I didn't want to write a play that will be useless in ten years: this is not a blog article about young people or contemporary art -- it's about the chaos that underlies human nature; a chaos that can be painted with different colors and associations."

When the sweeping force of poetry runs into the wall of one family's incommunicability, something has to give way. Or, at least, such is the premise of Denmark, an ensemble play by Matthew Gasda. Beginning with the autumnally-fading love affair of an ardent young woman and a much older writer, the play quickly reveals its deeper themes: honesty, faithfulness, the impossibility of hiding ourselves, all the ways we still try to do so as the young woman's family descends upon their beach house and discovers the relationship. No silence remains untouched, no secret can be kept guarded, as this mood of lyrical confrontation impregnates every other relationship as well: husband and wife, parent and child, sister and brother, an individual towards themselves. By the end, the single room in which the play is set almost feels like a confessional, but one in which the words and rituals for expressing pain seem to be lacking, a yet-to-be consecrated space in which penance and love may only ever be hinted at or longed for.

SUNY Oswego Theater Department has commissioned rising young NYC playwright Matthew Gasda to re-conceive and write a new translation/adaptation of THE BACCHAE by Euripides for the contemporary stage.

Performed in loft apartments, pop-up theatres, and other nontraditional spaces, the 2022 underground hit Dimes Square announced Matthew Gasda as a dramatist of lasting power and impressive range, the theatrical chronicler of a self-chronicling generation. At a time when large, institutional theatres were still finding their post-pandemic footing, this brutal, hilarious portrait of New York City scenesters drew in new and diverse audiences by distilling the zeitgeist of our strange new era-a bitter cocktail of dirtbag politics, casual depravity, and pitiless ambition.Bringing together four of Gasda's most penetrating works-Dimes Square, Quartet, Berlin Story, and Minotaur-this collection surveys a fractured and exhausted cultural-intellectual landscape. From squalid apartments to country estates to hipster bars, these plays give us characters grasping for meaning and human connection in an age of material abundance and moral dislocation. Unflinching, yet marked by exquisite moments of grace, they mark the arrival of a significant dramatic voice.

This is a book of collected poetry by Matthew Gasda. Poems were originally written between 2011 and 2021, some of which were previously published. All have been edited for the current edition by the poet.

a verb trying to find a tense yes like a tempo it's more like 9/8 than the old 4/4 today trying to transcribe this feeling of having fractured myself along the lines of

A philosophical novel in fragments.

This stream-of-consciousness, poetically and philosophically charged novel enriches, and expands, the consciousness of its readers.

Matthew Gasda's gorgeously contrapuntal "Orchid Elegy" is a long poem that, like a fugue, moves at once backwards and forwards, joining an impulse towards restless exploration and budding divagation with an instinct for recapitulation. Its 179 brief numbered sections are held both together and apart by a semantic tensegrity achieved through graceful thematic stratification; each structural node experiences the quality of its own solitude in resonance with an elegiac melos unfolding around and through it. These parcels of finitude, "petals like the characters of a play", constantly seek, both in form and in thought, the pattern of a lost Eurydice, even in the shifting, retreating presence of the Other, "for the most important category of beauty is the beauty of that which is lost". The spiral of longing persists through love, hunger and death. Yet, something is accomplished, if not necessarily captured, through the turning of this gyre of "lament and encomium". Tracing and dissecting through the alchemy of metaphor the form of the beloved, "slowly the poem emerges from its secret" and "consciousness emerges"; the poem, or the soul, becomes body, and vice versa, "a shared node transparent -- shining", and with renewed purpose, the elegy of life begins again.