The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, based out of a loft in Greenpoint, is known for shows that tread the line of intellectualism and indulgence. Playwright and director Matthew Gasda, who, since writing Dimes Square, has become the center of its downtown scene, introduces and closes out each production.
“That’s the play,” Gasda jumps in from his seat in the corner before the lights go down, fully. The twelve actors onstage point to him as they’re taking their bows.
Gasda’s newest play, playing at BCTR this July and August, is no different, theatricalizing psychoanalysis. Featuring six pairs of people discussing their relationships in the same apartment over a decade, it runs the gambit from siblings to one-night stands to friends who have slept together. Each scene centers around the apartment owner, always a woman dressed in Victorian lace, in front of a backdrop of zodiac signs. Across the years, these women share the same medieval art book that the audience never gets to see. The book, like many other elements of Morning Journal, seems to point towards an idea of meaning but is entirely unconcerned whether the audience will grasp it.
The first vignette, for instance, features friends Hazel (Anastasia Wolfe) and Celine (Asli Mumtas). Hazel has encouraged Celine to date her ex-boyfriend, Alex (portrayed later by Eric Olsson), and then when Celine and Alex get together, sleeps with him. Alex, Hazel tells us, is like her father, minus the abandonment; Celine competed with her mother for sexual attention from men. The whole scene has Freudian overtones – but this is exactly the problem. Gasda uses Freud and psychoanalysis as a guiding principle of the play, but does not expand upon them. It is as if he picked up a piece of philosophy and decided to stage it line by line, sacrificing characters for human-shaped symbols. At no point do we connect with Hazel, Celine, or Alex, but we do pick up on Gasda’s attempt to invoke something psychologically complex. Perhaps this is his primary intent.
The biggest reason for this disconnect is the fact that people simply do not talk in the way Gasda has written his play. Almost every line of dialogue is laced with a diagnostic tone reserved for either family or a therapist’s couch. With no provocations, characters will stare at each other and deliver baffling psychoanalytic reads as if they were facts. “Being jealous of you is being jealous of me,” Celine says. $100 to anyone who has said that in real life. Friends-turned-lovers Talia (standout cool girl Nicki Kissil) and Marley (Helena Frances Dreyer) spend a few stilted sentences talking about how the real problem is that Marley judges others for being able to release things that she keeps in, Kaylee (Healy Knight) thinks that boyfriend Nico (Johnathan Fernández) creates issues because he wants to play the role of the victim. Characters – sometimes ones who have met each other only hours before – are replaced with two-dimensional patients, diagnosing and therapizing each other to the point of incomprehension.
Not only do all these characters seem to have a read on each other, but they also know exactly the reason they do everything themselves. Nico tells Kaylee that he made himself into the bad person that she thought he was just to please her. This is not a revelation or even the climax of the scene, but an exchange peppered among a never-ending litany of other such ‘facts.’ Bad friend Eleanor (Agnes Enkhtamir) confidently concludes that she, subconsciously, wanted Zoe (Merlinda Akindele) to find out that she had been talking shit behind her back – a self-punishment for the selfish person that she is. Freudian psychoanalysis is the process of making the suppressed explicit. Morning Journal cheapens itself by putting everything out in the open from the get-go, never allowing characters a chance to have a subconscious themselves.
Maybe Gasda knows this. In work on his Substack, he refers to our over-therapized society, which these characters are clear victims of – and, to some extent, they know it. Kaylee, for example, accuses her boyfriend of trying to diagnose her. It is entirely possible that Gasda, in Morning Journal, has produced a commentary on a society full of pop culture mental health. The picture he paints, however, is one where not a single person is removed enough to comment on it. How can we produce a cognizant commentary delivered entirely from the inside? If this is what Gasda intends, it does not land.
Gasda himself has become something of a representative of the Off Off Off Broadway Scene, and Morning Journal is but the latest in a series of originals that take place in apartments, parks, and other nontraditional settings. His breakout hit, Dimes Square, started in a different loft in Greenpoint before moving into a living room in SoHo. BCTR flourishes as such an intimate space, with books and sheet music lying around the room, dry shampoo, and COVID tests in the bathroom. This, though, as charming as it is, cannot outrank the work itself.
Morning Journal is only one of Gasda’s plays this summer at BCTR, and the ‘events’ section of the Center’s website features an unprecedented amount of plays ‘coming soon.’ For all of its faults, I’m excited to see what will come next. Any kind of intellectualism, particularly in the ever-increasing world of commercial theater, should be encouraged. Morning Journal certainly succeeds at something — interrogating the hysterical world around us, creating a kind of unprecedented intimacy between audience and viewer— even if it is not what Gasda may have intended. For better or for worse, that’s the play.
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