On Gloria
Ten minutes into Gloria, I knew what was about to happen.
I think it’s a bit of a downer sometimes to have seen enough plays or movies that as a plot is set into motion, I can cross reference quick enough to spoil the outcomes for myself. Sometimes this leads me to lose interest in what I’m watching or to assume laziness on the part of the storytellers.
In Gloria, it built tension. It built foreboding. It made me want to leave the theatre. The pristine white set. The intern’s last day. The discussions about the meandering and meaninglessness of life. Every time the titular Gloria entered the scene, I felt uneasy. I wanted so badly to be wrong. To have the play surprise me by playing on what I knew was coming.
It didn’t. And Evan Cabnet’s direction of the horrific and disturbing incident that unfolds felt whatever the opposite of cathartic is. It felt like surrender. Like Dean, played by Ryan Spahn, there was nothing I could do in that moment but beg for it to be over. And just as it is, the audience is swept out of the scene, the black coming in from all sides. We’re out. We’re safe.
Sometimes that sense for plot design and story craft can prevent me from being swept up. What Branden Jacobs Jenkins does however is so calculated and so purposeful that I while I don’t think most of the audience will catch the foreshadowing, he isn’t hiding it. When real life tragedy occurs, we often point to the signs and say “How could we have missed this?”. Jenkins is asking the same question. Even though I knew what was going to happen, there’s one major aspect I didn’t see.
The endgame I had foreseen? That’s just the first act.
What follows after a fifteen minute intermission is a meditation on tragedy and ownership, on ambition and honesty. It’s reflection that we as Americans tend to avoid, especially since the events of Gloria can feel too ripped from the headlines for comfort. It’s statements on the profiteering of tragedy, the give and take between ambition and decency, and even violence itself perfectly encapsulate why Braden Jacobs Jenkins is one of the most relevant American playwrights today. Like my first experience with him, An Octaroon at SoHo Rep, Gloria uses shock and humor to foster a greater conversation about the darker sides of the human (and in the case of Gloria uniquely American) experience.
The cast, some of whom inhabit a variety of roles, are so measured and precise that it boarders on science. Gloria isn’t play where you’re expecting to see actors transform and chameleon their way through it, but lo and behold, that’s exactly what Kyle Beltran, Catherine Combs, and Jeanine Seralles do. Ryan Spahn, Jennifer Kim, and Michael Crane anchor the characters with the strongest view points, the voices you’ll be hearing long after the play has ended. Crane’s Lorin in particular feels like most of us, shouting into space, begging for the world to have some semblance of justice in it. It’s a uniformly wonderfully acted play, some of which must be attributed to Evan Cabnet’s direction (this guy is directing everything in America at any given time, I’m convinced of it). This might be my favorite thing on his resume, and TECHNICALLY I worked on one of them (Off the Main Road, Williamstown ’15). It’s play that balances a lot of hats - it’s a comedy, it has some very complicated special effects, it’s borderline Normal Heart levels of monologue porn - and it does them all seamlessly.
Even though I’m trying to remain as spoiler free as possible, it must be said the design efforts that go into Gloria’s climax are some I’ve never seen handled so well. I’ve seen similar effects attempted in other plays, but how they’re done here is another level of achievement. Maybe I just don’t get out enough, but I will one day corner someone in a conversation and have them walk me through how they did it, step by step. It’s that uncomfortably real.
Gloria is a play that is all too relevant to not live past this stellar production at the Goodman. I’m sure it will, but consider this my plea for you to seek it out. If it’s near you, see it. If it’s not, read it. If you have the power to produce it, do it. I haven’t been this moved or excited to talk about a play since Whorl Inside a Loop or Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo or An Octaroon.
It’s a play I’m gonna look back on and say “I’m acting so one day I get to do a play like THAT”.
