Gloria

Gloria begins as an ‘office comedy’, but it goes so much darker and deeper.  It is rich in contemporary issues and themes, integrated so skilfully and so entertainingly that things never get preachy and it is only by the play’s end that its full, sobering import registers.

Three young ‘editorial assistants’ start their day in the ‘culture department of a Manhattan magazine.  (Think The New Yorker – only with maybe lesser quality and lesser status.)  Each ‘assistant’, well educated, articulate and ambitious, is realizing that this job is a dead end.  Ani (Jane Harber) is sweet, sincere, punctual but shallow and a little naïve.  Dean (Jordan Fraser-Trumble), who, at thirty, finds his own literary ambitions floundering, is hung-over, but that’s normal.  He’s the only one who showed up at the eponymous Gloria’s housewarming party the night before – and it was so bad that there was nothing to do but drink.  Dean is the assistant to Nan, a senior editor, who at this stage is no more than a voice and blur behind frosted glass.  Kendra (Aileen Huynh) arrives late, burdened with shopping, but that’s normal too.  She’s a fast-talking cynic ahead of the pack: why bother doing any work?  There appear to be no consequences for her lateness or her extended coffee breaks at Starbucks.  All this is observed, or not, by intern Miles (Callan Colley), an ivy-league graduate who’s keeping his options open and who can infuriate or charm by saying so.  Their bickering and vocal distress over the death of a half-forgotten pop star is loud enough to annoy fact-checker Lorin (Peter Paltos) who may the only person in the building doing some actual work, and who interrupts to tell them to shut-the-f**k-up.

When Gloria (Lisa McCune in the first of two roles) does appear, she is dowdy, monosyllabic – almost robotic – and her very presence seems to embarrass the others…  After all, who besides Dean went to her party? 

To say more would involve spoiling the shocking but believable developments that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins structures so well.  The key event that ends Act I is horribly all too topical and it becomes the subject of Acts I and II when both Dean and Kendra, and then Nan (Lisa McCune) each attempt to exploit it in their own way.  But all three not only sensationalise a tragedy but each makes themselves the hero and subject of their version.  We watch incredulously at their ruthless appropriation of another’s story, in a milieu where everything can be (must be?) manipulated into a commodity and sold, and whoever does it best, wins.

Christina Smith’s magazine office set, her first of three sets for this production, gets just the right note: ‘modern’ but already shabby, cold and sterile, while Paul Jackson’s lighting has that bright but depressing fluoro feel.  Later there’ll be a brawl in a Christmas-y coffee shop all jolly reds and greens, and finally there are the indoor plants and beige of a television production company with its subtler glow.

Director Lee Lewis achieves making this rather intimate play work in the big Sumner space, and she definitely has comedy among her skills.  Here she has an excellent cast, all but Mr Paltos playing multiple roles.  What is so impressive and so in keeping with what I take to be the playwright’s intention is that all the characters except fact checker Lorin are wrapped in their own solipsism, for all their intelligence determinedly (necessarily?) unaware of the ethics of their behaviour.  Jane Harber’s airhead PA Callie in Act III is perhaps a type, but very funny, as perfectly judged as her characters in Act I and II.  Aileen Huynh’s Kendra is a phenomenon: a nasty motormouth and consciously ruthless.  Watch her persona transformation in Act I where she’s on the phone to her mother, suddenly speaking Mandarin (I think) with a bullying whine.  Callan Colley has three roles and excels in all three: from calculatedly laid back in Act I to gormless barista to frenetic trendoid in Act III.  Mr Fraser-Trumble puts his good looks and charisma on hold to give us the pathetic Dean and then an unrecognisable fellow in Act III.  And Ms McCune, usually such a sweetheart, here gives us a Nan who is quite something: such a nice, warm, sympathetic woman who makes your blood run cold with her sentimental egotism.

This is a play that has you laughing to the very end – but rather wishing you weren’t because what you’re laughing at is chilling, decadent and sad.  It’s about ambition and thwarted ambition, about the triumph of personality over talent, and a world in which journalism and even ‘writing’ itself are under assault from Twitter, Facebook and all the other on-line phenomena.  And it is these characters, as Mr Jacobs-Jenkins says, who decide what’s ‘newsworthy’ - and how and why it is.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Brett Boardman