In a Manhattan magazine office in the 2010s, a group of Millennials are anything but the editorial assistants they’ve been hired to be. They banter more than they write. They flippingly or antagonistically cut into each other’s conversation more than anything they edit for their precarious publication. They obviously hate their lives and maybe each other. Gloria’s different. She actually does something about both office and inhabitants. All are replaced by (doubling) actors eight months later in a Midtown coffee shop, then after two years at a TV production company scene in Los Angeles. Yet it is Gloria’s actions that affect everyone in all the settings. With originality, author Branden Jacobs-Jenkins manipulates the levels of their actions. Fittingly, director Greg Leaming assures that his actors interpret the complicated text in a range going from spontaneous to perplexed to carefully planned. As Gloria, Denise Cormier appears detached from the other magazine employees, perhaps because she’s obviously older and works in an area apart from theirs. Still, she has asked them to a party at her home. Though seemingly more authoritative, Gloria has a hang-dog look. She acknowledges only Aleksandr Krapivkin’s disgruntled Dean, the only one to have accepted her invitation. Dean wants to be a writer himself yet seems to drink more than to write. He hates the taunting of slick, privileged Delphi Borich as ultra stylish but savage Kendra. Always late, she’s an Asian-American princess productive only of insults and innuendo. In contrast, plain, dull Ani (Jenny Vallancourt, rightly nondescript) mostly keeps focused on her computer screen. Still, she’s the most likely of the crew to acknowledge Harvard student Bryce Michael Wood’s observant intern Miles whenever he joins them. It’s predictable that he’ll end up a boss. Wes Tolman makes an impression as Lorin, a fact checker. He keeps nervously coming from an adjacent area to quiet the noise from the assistants, whether verbally or from loud music some play. Lorin is the only consistent hold-over character in Act II, where he has returned to the magazine office he hated. Now he’s a Temp worker, but a normal person, soon to be studying for the better. Devoted to exploiting their past, even in dying media, Dean/Devin and Nan (Comier, looking smarter), a former boss who’s now pregnant, will be rivals. They explore the question of who has the rights to exploit the Act I office story. And what happens to the values exposed when Hollywood re-creates it? Strangely, this is the point the author seems to want to make us reach about all of his characters, yet they are far less absorbing than Act I’s. So satire has beat out substance. Reid Thompson’s office set comes on strong with gray steel framing and icy glass walls and four nondescript cubicles set off from bosses and other workers. The later coffee shop is a detailed mini-Starbucks. Unfortunately, the office (stage area) is too wide and the cubicles on each side too far apart to give the desirable feeling of the workers being cramped and unable to avoid each other. And the coffee shop unrealistically shows no sign of patrons other than the play’s characters in a quiet atypical of a Starbucks, also with no sign of any life on the street shown outside. There are some good appropriate music and realistic gun sounds. The technical highlight is the costumes--for example, an absolutely perfect fashion-shopaholic outfit and shoes adorning Kendra, gruesome gray for Gloria, and a peachy Harvard sweatshirt on Miles. Nan does look the well-appointed pregnant go-getter. If any of the above is confusing, it may be due partly to meeting the author’s request that no one reveal shocking detail that propels his drama away from comedy. Actually, he himself omits detail in what seems like an effort to stand out as clever.
