New York. A city that runs on ambition – and coffee.
In the offices of a notorious Manhattan magazine, ruthless editorial assistants vie for their bosses’ jobs and a book deal before they’re thirty. But bestselling memoir fodder is thin on the ground, and climbing the career ladder is hard when you’re trapped between Starbucks runs, jaded gossip and endless encircling cubicle walls…
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Gloria is a razor-sharp comic drama about ambition, office warfare and hierarchies, where the only thing that matters is selling out to the highest bidder.
The play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2016, and had its UK premiere at Hampstead Theatre, London, in 2017.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was named Most Promising Playwright at the Critics’ Circle Awards in 2018 for his plays Gloria and An Octoroon.
‘Confounds expectation to a heady and exhilarating degree… Gloria is pretty glorious’
— The Arts Desk
‘Brilliantly nuts and fresh… Jacobs-Jenkins is a seriously savvy playwright. He wears his smarts lightly’
— Exeunt Magazine
‘Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is one of America’s boldest young playwrights… some especially sharp satire… if the stinging office comedy that Jacobs-Jenkins dishes up early on calls to mind David Mamet, there’s more than a touch of the structural ingenuity of Caryl Churchill in what follows’
— Evening Standard
‘A shocking, unsettling and intelligent office dramedy from the sizzlingly in-vogue Branden Jacobs-Jenkins… on a sixpence, the play transforms from a farcical office satire – and a hilarious one, too – into an unsettling examination of contemporary employment culture, of unseen societal hierarchies, and of the distasteful rat race of grief that inevitably accompanies tragedy… the second invigorating UK debut in as many months from an insightful, intelligent, impish and hugely welcome transatlantic voice’
— The Stage
‘Another goodie from the super-smart Branden Jacobs-Jenkins… crisply funny in its relentless skewering of the pettiness and pretentions of a bunch of journalists, as well as offering a more profound look at the way traumatic experiences may be packaged up and sold to the highest bidder… sharply entertaining’
— Time Out
‘Clever and angry… it is fascinating and timely, and sometimes horribly funny’
— TheatreCat
‘Sharp, witty and inventive… the longer the play goes on and the deeper Jacobs-Jenkins digs, it becomes clear what he is writing about: not just the memory of a lost golden age that haunts American journalism, but the soullessness of the present in which any crisis is open to instant exploitation… a merciless modern satire’
— Guardian
Winner – Most Promising Playwright, Critics’ Circle Awards
For a study guide from Melbourne Theatre Company click here.
