The Lafayette family gather at their late father's home in Arkansas to bury the hatchet and prepare the former plantation for its Estate Sale. Until, that is, they make a discovery which changes everything. A gripping play about ghosts and the legacies we are left with, and a wickedly subversive appropriation of the great American family drama.
A bitingly comic, strikingly timely satire for the stage, which asks if we can ever break free from the people we used to be.
With a sharp eye for the dark underbelly of human behavior, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' new play Gloria shrewdly depicts the declining, dog-eat-dog industry of publishing in New York City. As an unnamed magazine struggles with the world's encroaching descent into the digital age, the human relationships within simultaneously implode. Ani, Kendra, and Dean are the sparring, sharp-tongued assistant editors, constantly competing and complaining, vying over power and a better position. Governed by ferocious wit and corrosive dialogue, these characters spend most of the first act sniping at one another and finding ways to ignore their industry's impending doom...until, true to Jacobs-Jenkins fashion, the action is derailed by a shocking turn
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' exhilarating play, drawing on Dion Boucicault's 1859 melodrama The Octoroon, won the 2014 Obie Award for Best New American Play. It had its UK premiere at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond in 2017, transferring to the National Theatre, London in 2018.
In the offices of a notorious Manhattan magazine, a group of ruthless editorial assistants vie for their bosses' jobs and a book deal before they're thirty. But trapped between Starbucks runs, jaded gossip and endless cubicle walls, best-selling memoir fodder is thin on the ground - that is until inspiration arrives with a bang...