Over the last few years, Matthew Gasda has become the talk of the Off Broadway scene. Since his breakout 2021 play Dimes Square, about Downtown New York’s backstabbing social circles, he’s written Morning Journal, Vanya on Huron Street, and Doomers, and co-founded The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, a small laboratory for his own work and that of other emerging playwrights. With his latest play, Over the Moon, Gasda turns his attention to romance. Set in a New York apartment, the story follows two cousins who move in together after they’ve both experienced romantic setbacks. Their neighbor, a Jungian psychoanalyst, bears witness to, and becomes entangled in, their emotional unraveling. “When I wrote this play,” says Gasda, “I wasn’t just thinking about my own breakup, but about the deeply avoidant, surveillance-obsessed dating culture that seems to have taken over. This play is a polemic against feeling too little and taking few risks.” —Jeanne Malle

Over the Moon goes up at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research from September 1 to 6, then from September 15 to 20