In Henrik Ibsen's final play, When We Dead Awaken, the sculptor Rubek creates s self portrait in his statue group "Resurrection Day" which is a figure he calls "remorse for an unrealized life."
Quite a bit of that "remorse for an unrealized life" can be seen onstage in The Last Days of Downtown, Matthew Gasda's new play now in previews at the Center for Theatre Research (formerly the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research).
Since the play is still in previews (officially opening April 17th), I won't say too much, other than that you should get your tickets now. The piece takes place in the downtown apartment of independent filmmaker Terry, who is simultaneously celebrating his 40th birthday and preparing to travel for a premiere of his latest movie.
When Terry leaves, his apartment gets taken over by Michael, the young star of his film, who uses the director's pad to throw parties and bed a series of women. Throughout the play, a crowd of actors appear onstage in a succession of scenes involving sex, drinking, vaping, and more onstage cocaine use than in anything I've seen since Stereophonic.
At one point, a character shares the story of an experience he had at a dive bar where for one brief moment, everyone watching the performance of an amateur band began to live in the present and just enjoy the music--before they all went back to the chatter of everyday life.
The Last Days of Downtown invites us to live in that present, so that, unlike Ibsen's characters, when we awake on Resurrection Day, we won't "see that we've never lived."
