On Acting

For kicks

Dimes Square (2022).

Note: Posts here have been sparser than I intended due to a few magazine pieces that have taken longer than I expected and also the acting I’ve been doing (see below). Now for a stretch posts here will be biweekly (twice a week) and mostly for paying subscribers. Thank you for reading. 

The new play Dimes Square by Matthew Gasda, my role in which is the subject of this post, returns May 20, 22, and 23 at 432 Hudson Street in the West Village. Tickets are available here. Another of his plays, Minotaur, is coming soon. 

A couple of years ago I got a DM from an anonymous Twitter account called no_valis or @FOMO_sacer. Nothing new: I get DMs from anonymous accounts all the time and sometimes the correspondence goes on for years without my ever knowing a single thing about the correspondent IRL. Anyway from this DMer I learned that he had been a teacher, now worked as a tutor, and wrote fiction and plays. He invited me to contribute to his substack (also anonymous), and I told him thanks for the invite but I write always under my own name and usually for money. All good interactions, and I enjoyed his stack, which was mostly aphorisms about the vicissitudes of pandemic life. This was in lockdown times. We talked about going for a drink but nothing came of it. Soon (not really) the vaccines arrived, as did summer. I went to a friend’s party in a backyard in Bed-Stuy and found myself sitting next to a guy who was drinking Fernet. His friends were joking about how he only drinks that stuff and it was almost gone. We got to talking and I told him it was nice to meet him. He said, “We already know each other actually. I’m Novalis.” He invited me and my date to his play the next weekend at a loft in TriBeCa. The play was called Quartet, and we enjoyed it. A bunch of us went out for a drink afterwards. Matt said he was writing a new play called Dimes Square. I said, “I hang out there all the time. I’d love to audition.”