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.

About the Author
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright. He won the 2014 Obie Award for Best New American Play, for his plays Appropriate and An Octoroon. His play Gloria was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Other credits include: Everybody (Signature Theatre), War (LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater), and Neighbors (The Public Theater). A Residency Five playwright at Signature Theatre, his recent honors include the MacArthur Fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, the Benjamin Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Theatre Award, the Steinberg Playwriting Award, and the Tennessee Williams Award. He currently teaches in the Hunter College Playwriting MFA Program.

Reviews

'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 *

'Abounds with the sort of brutal straight-talk, honed by the illusion-dissolving acid of wage-slave experience, that's calculated to make job-seeking millennials violently shudder even as they laugh... in less capable hands, this sort of thing could swiftly devolve into a water-cooler whinge writ large. But Jacobs-Jenkins has intelligent fun with the sense of entitlement of these gossips, back-stabbers and literary titans manque... the evening's essential thrill is unmistakable: the sighting of a major new talent'

* Telegraph *

'A whip-smart satire... A sharp-toothed comic drama with a whole lot to say'

* New York Times *

'Provocative, sharply observant and playfully theatrical'

* Hollywood Reporter *


Awards
Winner of Winner - Most Promising Playwright, Critics' Circle Awards 2018.



Book Information
ISBN 9781848426634
Author Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Nick Hern Books
Publisher Nick Hern Books