The Last Days of Downtown

Matthew Gasda follows up Dimes Square with a night that might be the end of an era. Film director Terry's 40th birthday: actors, writers, crypto guys, scene girls, exes, and hangers-on (all of whom are gossiping about each other, betraying each other, and performing for an audience that may not exist). Fellini-esque and metafictional, Gasda turns the downtown theater world inside out, giving us a director who is directing people who know they're being directed, in a play that keeps asking whether any of it was ever real, and that somehow, amid all the cruelty and posturing, arrives somewhere funny, sharp, and unexpectedly tender.