The office banter amongst the millennials who toil for a New Yorker-style magazine in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Gloria may be catty, querulous, gossipy, back-stabbing, and hilarious as all get-out, but the 33-year-old playwright has far more than edgy cable sitcom humor on his mind in his 2015 off-Broadway hit, a ripped-from-today’s-headlines gut-puncher of an Echo Theater Company West Coast Premiere.

 It’s a day like any other for 20something office cogs Dean (Michael Sturgis), Kendra (Jenny Soo), Ani (Alana Dietze), and Miles (Devere Rogers), i.e. Dean has shown up hungover from the night before, the late-as-usual Kendra once again gives new meaning to the term office bitch, Ani is doing her best to not make waves, and intern Miles’s eager-beaverness is putting all three slackers to shame.

Indeed, only two things make this morning stand out from those that have come before.

 To begin with, only Dean has had the decency to show up at the housewarming party thrown last night by longtime copy editor Gloria (Jessica Goldapple), and he isn’t about to let his co-workers off for leaving him there alone and bored out of his mind.

 It also happens that this morning’s Internet is all abuzz with the drug-overdose demise of indie rock star Sarah Tweed, about whom a last-minute in-depth profile has sent fact-checkers in the neighboring office scrambling to ensure its accuracy despite the racket that has one of them (Steven Strobel as sad-sack Loren) at his wit’s end.

 Audiences can be excused for wondering throughout Gloria’s HBO sitcom pilot-ready first act just what playwright Jacobs-Jenkins intends with all this clever, cutting, laugh-packed repartee.

It’s only following Act One’s bang-up of a finale that the writer’s intentions become clear with an eight-months-later second act that brings back several of the characters we’ve gotten to know (if not love) now seeking their fifteen-minutes of fame while making it clear that it’s not just Baby Boomers who merit being called the “Me Generation.”

Playwright Jacobs-Jenkins has much to say about the changing face of journalism since the advent of social media, and about a 21st-century America in which everyone believes they have a story worth telling even if it means making someone else’s their own (provided there’s a book deal and potential movie or mini-series on the horizon).

Chris Field directs Gloria’s West Coast Premiere with precision, power, and lickety-split pacing, and the performances he elicits are some of the very best in town.

Sturgis does his most exciting work to date as a young gay man whose innocence and optimism have been worn away by drone work, too much drinking, and the unlikelihood that the memoir he’s titled “Zine Dreams” will ever have much to say.

Soo positively dazzles as the venom-tongued Kendra, who makes up for her own lack of work ethic (she’s never far from the next bit of shopping on the way to the next Starbucks run) by opinionatedly bad-mouthing everyone she knows and doesn’t know.

A particularly memorable Goldapple goes from sullen quietly fuming “office freak” Gloria to Dean’s initially unseen boss Nan, whose devastating Act Two monolog Goldapple delivers with an emotional truth Jacob-Jenkins’ script then sneakily asks us to reevaluate.

 The always intriguing Dietze and terrific L.A. newcomer Rogers get to play three thoroughly distinct roles each (Sturgis and Soo each slip in a second part as well), and though only Strobel plays a single role from start to finish, his quietly forceful performance and a quietly devastating final scene make us wonder if it hasn’t been all about Loren all along.

 A crackerjack design team give Gloria a Grade-A look and sound, from Amanda Knehans’s stark, adeptly morphing set to Dianne K. Graebner’s character-defining costumes to Azar King-Abadi’s expert lighting to Christopher Moscatiello’s razor-sharp sound design and its dramatic use of the Gloria section of Bach’s “Mass in B Minor.”

Ahmed Best is fight choreographer. “Sarah Tweed” songs are written and performed by Sparrows Lullaby Band.

Alexa Vellanoweth is assistant director. Letitia Chang is production stage manager. Nicole DuPort understudies Gloria and Nan.

 Gloria is produced by Kevin Johnson and Rachael Zambias. Nick Abrell and Lindsay Graves Fisher are associate producers.

Audiences will be talking about Branden Jacobs-Jenkin Gloria long after its final fadeout. A decidedly different look at a hot-button topic that must be kept mum in a review, it is Echo Theater Company at its most excitingly cutting-edge.

The Echo Theater Company @ Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village.
www.EchoTheaterCompany.com

–Steven Stanley
September 24, 2018
Photos: Darrett Sanders

Tags: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Echo Theater Company, Los Angeles Theater Review