Gloria: The tyranny of form

“Gloria is television theatre, for a television generation.” Alison Croggon reviews Gloria, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play at the Melbourne Theatre Company

I usually do my reading after a show. For me, the experience of seeing the work on stage is paramount: it’s an action taking place in the present moment, the intense and volatile focus in which different art forms – performance, writing, visual and sonic art – meet and meld in front of a living, breathing audience.

Theatre is temporal and ephemeral: artists build their work before your eyes, and then it’s over. This is why it can be so astounding, why a single performance can literally change a life – or, conversely, why nothing (except possibly a bad poetry reading) can so comprehensively kill your soul. If you’re in the same room with the people making the work, you can’t escape your implication in the event. You’re present, just as the performers are. You don’t need preparatory reading to be present.

Which brings me to Gloria, by US playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, which opened last week at the Melbourne Theatre Company. It’s an exercise in satirical uber-realism that opens in the glamorous office of a prominent magazine maybe not a million miles from the New Yorker, where three twenty-something editorial assistants bitch about their jobs and lives and each other.

What follows is a comprehensive take-down of the current state of the US media and literary industry, as laid out in several million op-eds over the past decade. It’s all very familiar: the ambitious, viciously competitive graduates tumbling towards disillusion in the hierarchical ruins of a rapidly crumbling industry. The exploitation, the complacency, and the lumbering liberal status quo, which is really just code for middle-class self-interest.

In Gloria, various representative characters expose the toxicity of the competitive workplace, either through their outsiderness – the young intern Miles (Callan Colley), with his sceptical and horrified eye – or their insiderness, like the sharp-tongued, disillusioned Kendra (Aileen Huynh) or the alcoholic going-nowhere Dean (Jordan Fraser-Trumble). Or the insider-outsider, the eponymous Gloria (Lisa McCune) herself.

There’s not much to criticise about Lee Lewis’s production, which strikes me as a careful and detailed realisation of this text. Christina Smith’s set and costumes, Russell Goldsmith’s sound and Paul Jackson’s lighting all generate the necessary illusion of heightened reality. You can, for example, read everything on the menu in the Starbucks café in act two.

The performances involve a lot of doubling: Lisa McCune, for instance, plays both Gloria, the office freak, and the editor Nan. McCune’s performance is impeccable, and she’s supported by an excellent cast, although Peter Paltos as Lorin, the mid-career fact-checker, stands out. Lorin is the only role that isn’t doubled, and ultimately he becomes the focus of this constantly shifting play, as a kind of benign mirror of Gloria.

It’s a slick and realised production of some slick and realised writing. But the whole time I was watching, a little vein was throbbing in my head. Despite the sensational aspects of this production – and there’s certainly sensation – I was bored.

Part of it was a generic impatience. There I was, watching another three-act naturalistic play about the anxieties of middle-class crisis, which invites its middle class audience to identify directly with the characters on stage. Another parable about empathy, which is surely one of the most misunderstood and misused concepts in contemporary writing: and maybe, especially in US writing. Another branch, as Brecht put it, “of the narcotics business”.

Gloria is television theatre, for a television generation: a style wholly recognisable from shows like Mad Men, or Parks and Recreation, or Cheers, or The Office. There’s no denying it’s smartly written. And because it’s not unintelligent, it has its own answers to these objections built in. But it led me to some questions about form, and especially about irony.

So I went home and did a bunch of reading.

What follows has comprehensive spoilers, so if anyone is planning to see this, read no further. Unless you’re not bothered by spoilers, of course…

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins comes hailed as one of the most promising playwrights of his generation. His earlier plays, Neighbours, Appropriate and An Octoroon, a contemporary adaptation of a 19^th century melodrama set on a slave plantation, are all explorations of blackness in US society. It’s not surprising to learn that the New Yorker was a formative influence on both his work and his ambitions – he worked as an editorial assistant there for three years after he graduated from Princeton, and although he says the workplace portrayed in Gloria isn’t a portrayal of the New Yorker, it clearly informs it.

Like his Korean-American colleague Young Jean Lee, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has made a reputation of playing with theatrical form. And like Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, in Gloria he’s playing with the classic bourgeois structure of the three act naturalistic play. It’s of course predictable that these are the two works out of these young playwrights’ oeuvre that have been programmed by the MTC. I would, for example, have much rather have had the chance to see Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Octoroon.

The MTC’s 2016 production of Straight White Men, directed by Sarah Giles, was, among other things, a great deal of fun. And it’s a much more rigorous subversion of the naturalistic form than Gloria, unafraid of breaking it open. It practically had flags – or at least, it had Candy Bowers – pointing out its own ironies. Not that that stopped a number of critics reviewing it as if it were simply a straight play about the emotional travails of straight white men. It’s hard to break the habits of perception.

Nothing as adventurous as Young Jean Lee’s meta-theatrical commentary disrupts Gloria: it’s straight television naturalism from beginning to end, even using televisual tricks, like the Bach Mass in B Minor with which it opens revealed as the music in the intern’s headphones. Instead of breaking the form, Jacobs-Jenkins relies on a shocking event at the end of act one – a mass office shooting by the despised “emotional terrorist” Gloria – to derail expectations and to set up two conversations after interval, which occur respectively a few months and two years after the catastrophe.

In those conversations (the whole play, aside from the single act that defines it, is a series of conversations) we are shown how grief and trauma are commodified, how the competitive world of literary politics destroys the vulnerable and elevates the least vulnerable, how even a shocking event like a mass shooting is falsified and smoothed over, becoming just another thing to sell. As is, it’s impossible not to reflect, this play itself: the particular shooting might be fictional, but it’s drawing from real workplace shootings that occur all over the US.

It nags me that it’s women who sit at the extreme ends of this schematic snapshot, and who end up representing the evils of the contemporary media industry. Gloria is the abyss in the middle of the play, the alienated violence which sits at the heart of contemporary capitalism. All we know is that she bought a home after years of unnoticed graft and almost nobody came to her housewarming party, and that she didn’t shoot Dean because he was kind to her. So we’re forced to assume that the degraded human relationships and lack of empathy caused by workplace competitiveness are the root of this extreme violence, or at least, its logical result.

The double casting of Gloria with Nan, the editor who lands a television deal for her book, emphasises that winning and losing are two faces of the same phenomenon. Nan’s moment of self-exposure, a sentimental speech about her pregnancy and motherhood-as-redemption that she immediately and ruthlessly decides to sell to the highest bidder, is immediately compromised by her commodification of it. Kendra, on the other hand, is abrasive and competitive, a truthteller whose truth is compromised by her self-centredness. In her own, less successful way, she’s shown to be as ruthlessly exploitative as Nan, her ambitions probably hobbled by institutional racism.

The male characters are notably more sympathetic. Dean suffers a breakdown after the shooting, and doesn’t recover. His attempt at capitalising on the tragedy is shown to be haplessly manipulated by the industry – after his brief moment of tv celebrity there’s a bidding war for his book, which inevitably is transformed from his original idea into a memoir about the shooting. His moment of violence is, for the audience, mitigated by his mental distress.

Miles, the intern, is the sweet, talented innocent, beset with the anxieties of the zeitgeist, but full of naive and altruistic ambition. Lorin, the mid-level, stressed fact checker who ends up being the moral centre of the play, is the one character endowed with some self-insight, and who decides that he wants to make some human connection, to be “more present”. And there’s a hint that Lorin might be the “real” writer.

These portraits have a grain of truthfulness, of course, but they belie the representative nature of this work. Women certainly have committed mass shootings, but statistically-speaking it’s very rare. And, maybe more disturbingly, the thing that most mass shooters have in common is a history of violence against women. Likewise, women, especially white women, do triumph in the world of celebrity writing. But again, statistically men get most of the limelight. The lower echelons of publishing might be populated by women, but almost all the CEOs are male. And in all the all the high status publications, it’s men who get the space, the reviews, the status and the bylines.

Nothing in this play scratches past the symptoms of alienation: if anything, it obscures the problems at the centre of the beast. It presents itself as representative and critical, but instead subtly reinforces the status quo. As a phenomenon, it feels like a quintessential product of liberal America. It’s a conventional play that, despite a veneer of difference, conventionally critiques aspects of conventional US society. The naturalistic form is reshaped, not entirely successfully, for the present moment, but it’s effectively what we saw in Mamet’s take on a real estate office, Glengarry Glenross, or, less dextrously, in David Williamson’s The Club. It’s pretty much the theatrical equivalent of a New Yorker essay: slick, smart, nimble, and with the odd breakout moment of something approaching truthfulness.

I think the intention is to use the form as an ironic counterpoint to the story. But the irony doesn’t hit, because the form swallows it all and flows on, unbroken. The eye still sees what the eye has always seen, perhaps a little more focused now on what it’s always been looking at. And that’s why I was bored.

Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by lee Lewis. Sets and costumes by Christina Smith, lighting by Paul Jackson, composition and sound design by Russell Goldsmith. With Callan Colley, Jordan Fraser-Trumble, Jane Harber, Aileen Huynh and Peter Paltos. Melbourne Theatre Company until July 21. Bookings

Contains some coarse language, sexual references and a scene depicting graphic violence, gun shots and theatrical blood. Recommended for ages 16+. For detailed information about the production’s content click here. 

The Southbank Theatre is wheelchair accessible. The MTC accepts Companion Cards. Special performances: Audio description and tactile content tours at 6.30pm, Tuesday July 3, and 4pm Saturday July 7. Captioned performance at 8pm, Thursday July 5.