As his ‘existential’ new work hits London, Gasda speaks to Dazed about AI, doom, and wrangling ‘Dimes Square degenerates’
You could say that Matthew Gasda specialises in period pieces – that is, culture, politics, and technology have accelerated to such a fast pace that his contemporary plays have already entered the history books by the time they hit the stage. “You’re not only seeing a contemporary play,” he tells Dazed, having recently landed in London. “You’re also seeing, weirdly enough, a play about the recent but also very distant past at the same time.”
In 2022, Gasda metabolised the vibe (shift) of NYC’s Dimes Square – a micro-neighbourhood and pseudointellectual scene that emerged during the coronavirus pandemic – into his breakout play of the same name. In Dimes Square the play, as in real life, a bunch of artists, writers, influencers, and nepo babies gather in a Chinatown loft to talk about converting to Catholicism, hating sex, loving cocaine, and living through “the dumbest time in human history”.
This claim, that we’re living through the dumbest time in human history, bookends the play. Does Gasda still think it rings true, in 2025? Not quite. “It’s not the dumbest anymore,” he says. But it is the most... something. He begins searching, through a haze of jetlag, for a different adjective. “Apocalyptic? Dangerous? Existential?”
This pretty much sets the tone for his most recent play, Doomers, directed by Zsuzsa Magyar. This time, the action takes place in a slick San Francisco apartment, loosely based on the firing and rehiring of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in 2023 (which is also the plot of an upcoming film by Luca Guadagnino). In case you can’t remember, or had already sworn off X at the time, the founder was ousted in a surprise ‘coup’ in November 2023, only to be rehired several days – and multiple emergency CEOs – later.
As such, the poets and clout-chasers of Dimes Square are traded out for a cast of AI researchers, ethicists, and Silicon Valley insiders. For Gasda, this meant switching up his usual casting process, which puts real people onstage to play versions of themselves (often in a debut performance). “Dimes Square degenerates will want to be in a play because they’re not necessarily... doing stuff, all the time,” he explains. But: “Real tech people are way busier than scene-y writers.” However, it also opened up a whole new world of philosophical questions about technological ‘progress’, the future of humanity, and who gets to shape it, borrowing heavily from real conversations with big players inside the AI industry.
Below, Gasda tells Dazed more about Doomers, which is running at London’s Rose Lipman Building until October 3.
Let’s start with Dimes Square. How has that play led you to where you’re at today?
Matthew Gasda: I mean, it started totally organically in the summer of 2021. The name Dimes Square was just floating around New York. I didn’t really know what it was. But I heard the name, and then I began to triangulate people and locations, and say, ‘Okay, there’s something here.’ I think I joked at a party that I was going to write a play called Dimes Square and someone said, ‘Terrible idea. Don’t do it.’ I immediately thought that was a positive signal, that I should continue.
Since Dimes I’ve kind of officialised this process, but it started with Monday night readings... people [would] come through and watch the different drafts. Depending on your vibe, it was still the pandemic. Bars were definitely still closing early [and] there was a shortage of night life, so I think gathering to read the play was something to do. The first run of the play, the audiences were full of writers and filmmakers and critics. People were drinking, onstage and offstage, and it just had a really loose energy. From that, a legend was born I guess. It was written about a lot and then it became a part of Dimes Square, the productions themselves became part of downtown life, even if they weren’t located in downtown.
The success of Dimes catalyzed into a full-time theater company, and I brought back the play this past winter, mostly with the new cast. It’s now in Stockholm, in Swedish, and translated into Stockholm hipster culture.
People were drinking, onstage and offstage, and it just had a really loose energy. From that, a legend was born I guess
How differently does it read, outside that very specific context of Dimes Square?
Matthew Gasda: I mean, I won’t understand it, but I’ll be able to see the body language... They’re speedrunning exactly what we did. My friend Hannah [Wikforss-Green] kind of duplicated the process, casting a mixture of influencers, nepo babies, writers, stage actors... That’s kind of the magic, is the looseness of seeing really well-trained actors, with people who have never been on stage before, who eventually became actors through doing it.
How do you go from that to writing a play about the OpenAI drama? You’ve told me that you only have a flip phone, so how do you end up in that world?
Matthew Gasda: That’s pretty easy to answer. I have Twitter, or X now, on my laptop, and that’s enough to give me access to contemporary culture. I remember following the [OpenAI] story the weekend it happened. Like everyone else, I was pretty wrapped up in it, and it did have a very dramatic beat structure. It felt like every hour there’d be a new update, a new turn... it was also extremely opaque, and no one really knew what was going on behind the scenes.
Then, it turned out I had a friend of a friend who was working pro-bono in the AI regulation sphere, but was a law professor and had made money in the private sector, and had a big loft in Tribeca, and was hosting another play of mine. After one of these shows, he had some friends from big AI companies, and they knew my work from Dimes. I kind of pitched them on this idea I had, of staging the night of Sam Alman’s firing, and we ended up having a three-hour conversation about all these doom scenarios. I saw and heard how the tech world philosophised. There’s a stretch [in Doomers] where they’re talking about all these different, really arcane doom scenarios – those were straight out of this conversation.
Was it a challenge to capture the voices of those characters?
Matthew Gasda: The AI world loves to talk about itself, kind of like Dimes Square. It turns out they’re all incredibly online, and you just listen, you just read it. You don’t need to spend three years becoming a tech bro to learn [the] lexicon, learn jargon. And as a playwright, I do have a knack for listening to someone and being able to capture the way they speak.
My bigger social dramas are a way of processing aspects of social reality that make me anxious and kind of ill at ease in the world. And so there’s a sense of purging that, when they’re done
Did your perspective on AI change over the course of writing the play? Did you update your P(doom)?
Matthew Gasda: My bigger social dramas are a way of processing aspects of social reality that make me anxious and kind of ill at ease in the world. And so there’s a sense of purging that, when they’re done.
When I was writing it, I think I got really deep into doom. I think it’s natural when you first start reading about AI to become a doomer. and then I think it’s natural to moderate, and to realise there are a lot of different outcomes. Because I had to write the other sides of it, I had to make some characters make fun of other characters for being doomers. Distributing your consciousness, seeing from different viewpoints, then taking seriously those different viewpoints, does end up moderating your point of view.
I mean, I think the world has already gone through intense transformations, and AI will obviously continue to change our world. Is that going to be Skynet? I don’t think so. That’s my current feeling. I have a feeling we’re more in for a slow dystopia. Everyone imagines a humanoid robot, or something that hacks into every computer system and takes them over. I don’t really see it that way. I think it could be just slow, gradual transformations of our reality that take away the things we care about, but aren’t necessarily the end of the world.
‘Slow dystopia’ still doesn’t sound great...
Matthew Gasda: It doesn’t sound great, but the thing about [a] slow dystopia is it gives you time to alter and change and to adapt, rather than... true doom is like, you wake up and it’s over. I think it’s extremely important to understand we have agency too. And I think the problem with doomerism is it does strip you of that. It becomes a kind of nihilistic joke, where you just say, ‘It’s all over and there’s no point and you guys are losers and idiots for not seeing where it’s all headed,’ and then the opportunity is lost.