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Past Reviews Off Broadway Reviews |
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How can that be, you may be wondering—surely something else must be going on. Well... yes. This should not shock anyone who's seen Jacobs-Jenkins's previous plays. In works like An Octoroon, Neighbors, and Appropriate, the young playwright has demonstrated a searing knack for extracting pinpoint drama from naked metaphor, even if the final execution is not all it should be. And though Jacobs-Jenkins is writing in a more conventional mode this time, the blooming of his ideas is no less alluring, and the final picture they paint of a small group in the midst of a big crisis of body, soul, and conscience is by far his strongest theatrical creation to date. The other part of this, sadly, is that to reveal the lynchpin occurrence that makes everything makes sense and makes this an early contender for the best play of the newborn theatre season would cause the towering house of surprises to collapse. Luckily, because Jacobs-Jenkins has structured his play so well, and filled it with such sumptuous, relatable characters, you don't need to know what makes it all tick. You simply need to trust that it will all come together, which it does, in taut, heartbreaking fashion. And, as mentioned, it all starts in an office. A Manhattan magazine office, to be exact (the playfully sterile set, which has a trick or two up its own sleeve, is by Takeshi Kata), in roughly the present. It's an ordinary place packed with ordinary employees, who haven't yet realized how extraordinary everyone outside the walls thinks they aren't. Dean (Ryan Spahn) is an editor's assistant on the cusp of 30 who's been at work here many years longer than he initially planned, and is shopping around a novel (titled Zine Dreams) about his experiences watching the decline of print publishing from the inside out. He gets along well with his cubicle neighbor, Ani (Catherine Combs), a relatively new employee who hasn't yet lost her lust for the business. He is rather less enamored of Kendra (Jennifer Kim), who comes in late, leaves early, and never writes. As for the still-in-school intern, Miles (Kyle Beltran), he's friendly and eager, but who knows anything else about him?
That, by the way, is when the spoilers kick in. But it's not giving away too much to say that Jacobs-Jenkins uses the deadline-kissing chaos to add blasts of heat to the underlying toxic mix of personalities. This is a cross-section of the country, divided along complex, interlocking, and not necessarily easily discernible lines that at once suggest certain problems and ignore others that are maybe even more important, so a single spark is all that's needed for a full-scale ignition. This is done with some bite; droll droning, as befits the subject (I must admit, the snap-ready Lorin was uncomfortably recognizable to me); and more than a little raw comedy ("Kendra, you're a rich Asian girl from Pasadena with a degree from Harvard," Dean spits at his nemesis at one point. "That is essentially a privileged straight white man.") Jacobs-Jenkins hits the gas at the end of the first act, and doesn't ease up until the end of the second. This gives him plenty of time to investigate the consequences of earlier happenings and unveil the ways the relationships between certain key members of the sextet grow as the months and eventually years pass. Subsidiary characters also come into focus to build out the texture and provide further reflections and refractions of the core principles. Everyone's perspective on their unique office environment, and the events that took place there, is distinct, but are they all equally valid? Are some opinions or viewpoints worth more than others? And if so, does it matter how much truth—if any—those contain? It's ridiculously rich and, as the layers accumulate, powerful and moving stuff that implicates everything about the news and social culture in which we're mired, and forces us, like the characters, to confront our complicity in every part of it. The title hints at how far this goes, referring not merely to the copy editor who becomes more important than anyone could have guessed, but also the craving for name and position, and the musical selection from Bach's "Mass in B Minor" that becomes a critical way for these people to drown out the violent, overwhelming world. Evan Cabnet has directed with an unswerving eye for detail, and a pacing and oppressive atmosphere that I'm not sure could be bettered. As for the actors, they're all well cast and no one strikes a totally false note, but none lands with quite the precision that might be ideal. Each has many wonderful moments, but also instances where they straw a bit too much toward the broad. Crane finds the best balance overall, though his role is also the smallest. Of the remainder, Serralles is the most consistent, which is no small achievement given the enormous changes in attitude she must effect as the action unfurls. Kim is the probably the loosest, and the most prone to straying from emotional accuracy. Because Jacobs-Jenkins and Cabnet are so dead-on throughout, however, no one can stop the evening from gaining and expelling more momentum than most plays can even imagine. What's more, it's so thoroughly original that even when you think you're headed down a well-worn road, you instead end up someplace dazzlingly different. As drama, as comedy, as commentary, and as theatre, Gloria is just plain glorious.
Gloria
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