Gloria - finally, a media satire that really hits the mark

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• Title: Gloria
• Written by: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
• Director: André Sills
• Actors: Nabil Traboulsi, Athena Kaitlin Trinh, Savion Roach
• Company: ARC
• Venue: Crow’s Theatre
• City: Toronto
• Year: To March 20, 2022

Critic’s Pick

For close to five years now, I’ve had a copy of the script for Gloria by the American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on my bookshelf – but have not read it.

The reason is this: My wife got to the wicked satire of the media business first. “If you think you’re going to see it in a theatre someday, don’t read it,” she advised me. “Don’t spoil it for yourself.”

Well, my chance to see Gloria on a stage finally arrived on Friday, when it had its Canadian premiere at Crow’s Theatre in a typically solid production from the Toronto indie company ARC.

I was glad, not for the first time, to have heeded my wife’s advice (and, also, not to have read the audience advisory). I’ve rarely been so shocked at the theatre as I was by one of the plot twists.

Gloria is a comedy set on the culture desk of a high-brow American magazine headquartered in New York. The fictional publication in the play seems something like The New Yorker, where Jacobs-Jenkins worked briefly before his playwriting career took off.

If you think everyone in such a setting might talk like an NPR podcaster, well, the millennial strivers that populate the play definitely do not – and have mouths that could make some of David Mamet’s characters blush.

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Kendra (Athena Kaitlin Trinh) and Dean (Nabil Traboulsi), both twentysomethings stuck in humiliating assistant positions at the mag, are plotting paths out of what they see as a dying industry that is, infuriatingly, still run by the very people who ignored the internet until it almost crushed them.

While Kendra openly badmouths colleagues and management, and acts as if she’s above it all (simultaneously running several attention-seeking Twitter accounts on the side), Dean seethes more quietly, working on a memoir in secret and trying to make the right connections in his off-hours to sell it.

The two are classic office rivals, minus the romantic undertones. Dean, who enters hungover from attending a colleague named Gloria’s awkward housewarming in the first scene (yes, per the title, this will be important), is exhibit A in Kendra’s argument that “schmoozers become boozers.” “Too much networking turns you into an alcoholic,” she says, harshly, accurately.

The only person beneath these two in the magazine hierarchy is an intern named Miles (Savion Roach), who is kind, a bit goofy and very Generation Z.

Kendra and Dean fear him and use him, while also feeling unjustifiably superior having come up in a time when internships were unpaid – before those who enforce labour laws started paying attention to magazines.

Jacobs-Jenkins, who first came to prominence with his fascinating dramatic dissection of Dion Boucicault’s 19th-century race/racist melodrama An Octoroon, explores how race, sexuality and class intersect with office politics in a historically white-led institution in an interesting way here. Kendra is, according to the script, Chinese-American or Korean-American, while Dean is “white” and Miles is “Black.” The quotation marks are the playwright’s.

But Jacobs-Jenkins’s primary interest in Gloria is the generation gap – or, rather, gaps. The setting may be rarified, but millennials of all professions will half-cheer and half-cringe at Kendra’s epic resentful rant about boomers, who she describes as “postwar glutton-babies ... spoiled on the riches of being an American when being an American was basically the Best.”

There is an almost redemptive monologue from an older editor name Nan (Deborah Drakeford) in the second act to counter this. But the play ultimately, and darkly, paints a picture of a world where people are unapologetically pulling the ladders up behind them; enacting a scorched-earth policy on an earth about to be permanently scorched.

André Sills, the actor who starred in An Octoroon at the Shaw Festival in 2017, is making his directorial debut here, and helps his ensemble find a workable acting style for a tonally complicated piece of writing. The performances may not be especially deep – but I suspect empathizing with the characters too much might make the play unpalatable after the twist I shall not name.

The exception is Carlos Gonzalez-Vio’s comic and then deeply felt performance as the desperate office fact-checker Lorin, whose character resurfaces in an unexpected way to give a little hope for humanity at the end.

Despite its almost sitcom-like surface, Gloria is theatrical in its structure, with Jacobs-Jenkins using doubling and tripling of parts to create an onstage environment where each scene seems haunted by what came before.

But it is also, at times, just ridiculously funny. I almost always dislike plays that are set in the world of journalism or media because I can hear the false notes. There isn’t a single one here, however. The playwright’s “lived experience” – one of the contemporary concepts that gets examined from all angles – in the industry he is dramatically disrupting is very apparent.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage.