Gloria
Opening Night: June 17, 2015
Closing: July 18, 2015
Theater: Vineyard Theatre
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, 2014 Obie Award winner for Best New American Play (AN OCTOROON, APPROPRIATE) and winner of The Vineyard’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, makes his Vineyard mainstage debut with GLORIA. This funny, trenchant and powerful new play follows an ambitious group of editorial assistants at a notorious Manhattan magazine, each of whom hopes for a starry life of letters and a book deal before they turn thirty. But when an ordinary humdrum workday becomes anything but, the stakes for who will get to tell their own story become higher than ever. Developed at The Vineyard during Branden’s residency, GLORIA is directed by Evan Cabnet (OUTSIDE PEOPLE).
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June 17, 2015
Anyone who’s ever worked for a big Manhattan magazine will find much to savor and shudder over in “Gloria,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s whip-smart satire of fear and loathing in a beleaguered industry under siege, which opened on Wednesday night at the Vineyard Theater. Everyone else — or at least everyone with a tonic streak of cynicism — is likely to appreciate Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s depiction of the cannibal culture cycles that grip and warp Americans’ attention these days. But audiences unacquainted with daily Darwinian life in the halls of publishing may have trouble buying just how craven, petty, perfidious and angry its characters are. “Surely,” you may object, “it’s not really like that.” Well, yeah, it really kind of is. (I say this as someone who once toiled in cubicle-filled, fluorescent-lighted vineyards similar to the one depicted here.) Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins, a young chameleon playwright with a cold but twinkling eye, may have exaggerated certain aspects of this portrait of a profession in flux for comic rhythm and snap.
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