‘Gloria’ unleashes moral whirlwind
Spirited cast of 6 plays 13 roles
Don’t you just hate people sometimes? How self-obsessed they are, how gratuitously cruel? But don’t you feel for them, too, how cruelly they’re treated, how ignored or betrayed?
Victimizer or victim, who is which?
And isn’t all this also pretty funny, expressed with a rapid-fire malice and verve that make us laugh, with the kind of brittle laughter that leaves a bad taste?
If I sound like I’m spinning in a moral whirlwind, that’s the effect of “Gloria,” a crisp, comic-sad play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, now staged with brio by the Hatch Arts Collective in a contemporary space at Nova Place on the North Side.
Along the way, “Gloria” also is a satire of bureaucracy and contemporary assumptions of entitlement, especially the new entitlement of victimhood, mainly among the self-obsessed Gens Y and Z. Maybe the satire is all the sharper because I come from the distant regions of Gen Ancient.
The story starts out like an episode of a taut version of “The Office,” as lower- to mid-level editors and assistants at a Manhattan magazine publisher bitch and squabble, playing status games mainly by knocking each other down. Its humor plays freely with the heightened divisions of race, gender, age and personality.
That is, it’s very funny but also awful, as we laugh at repellent behavior we recognize. I suppose in these early stages it takes a better person than I to withhold judgment: I found myself favoring one person or another, wanting to raise myself above the squalid competition by identifying victims and victimizers.
But the playwright won’t let us do that, because — as the surprising story veers past a sudden, mid-play crisis to the further surprises of some months later and then a couple of years after that — people just aren’t what they may have seemed. Or not entirely so. Or maybe they are. The longer the play goes on, the less sure we can be, and when it ends, it could easily go on and on twisting and turning, reaching out and gathering us up in its moral murk.
Along the way, it provides a good dramaturgic workout, requiring us to figure out who, what, when and where, forcing us to lean forward and find the story even as we are struggling with that moral uncertainty.
This audience engagement is heightened by the device of having six actors play 13 roles. So when an actor enters a scene several months later, we don’t initially know whether she’s the character she played previously or someone new — or, indeed, a previous character radically changed by what’s happened.
The acting company makes this work by the shading of its characterizations. And on opening night, the printed programs weren’t distributed in advance, freeing us from obsessively tracking characters through the cast list. Whether that was intentional or the programs just arrived late, I tip my hat: Let us work it out on our own without thumbing through a program for clues.
Among the company, Max Pavel and Sami Ma have the richest roles as Dean and Kendra, who spiral down from bland antagonism into something darker, fighting over ownership of the catastrophe at the center of the play.
But Erika Cuenca’s Nan is a pretty astonishing character, Dylan T. Jackson gets an amazing monologue, Moira Quigley adroitly juggles three roles and Ricardo Vila-Roger, who has the luxury of playing just one, turns out to be as close as the play comes to the moral center of this disturbed universe.
It falls to director Adil Mansoor, one of the Hatch Arts Collective founders, to keep all these different strands of narrative, emotion and intellect distinct. He moves them along with dispatch. But I do wish his actors would take better care of the older ears in the audience.
Aside from a relatively new company in a new space, the real star is the playwright. At 33, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins already has won two Obies (one for “An Octoroon”) and twice been a Pulitzer finalist (once for “Gloria”). None of his plays seems like the others. Remember his name.
As to the name of this play, it is obviously ironic, as Hatch Arts emphasizes with a burst of baroque triumphalism at the start. But what seems simply ironic can also be complex, as sureties come into question, with violence and trauma refracted through different perspectives in a disturbing, “Rashomon”-like dynamic. “Gloria” is as current and disturbing as today’s news cycle.