Gloria

Gloria is a dark comedy by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins about the junior staff of a prestigious Manhattan magazine in the 2010s. Each of its editorial assistants wants to be a writer, ideally with a book deal before their thirtieth birthday, and they jockey for advancement in an industry that keeps shrinking. It is an original play, not an adaptation.

The play began Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in 2015 and became a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist. Its first Broadway production comes from Second Stage Theater at the Hayes Theater, the same stage where Jacobs-Jenkins's Appropriate and Purpose played. Evan Cabnet, who directed the 2015 premiere, returns to stage it.

The title character is a copy editor who has spent 15 years at the magazine without a promotion. The night before the play begins, she threw a party at her home that almost none of her co-workers attended, and the next morning she moves through the office in a fog.

The assistants around her trade gossip and jabs. Dean, an assistant for five years who drinks hard and networks nonstop, arrives hungover from Gloria's party. Kendra wanders in late with shopping bags she calls research, and she and Dean openly loathe each other. Ani is the cheerful one; Miles, a college intern, is finishing a six-week stint. Lorin, a 37-year-old fact-checker, keeps barging in to demand quiet until his frustration with a stalled career boils over. Their boss, Nan, is never seen in the first act.

At the end of the first act, the play swerves hard. What happens is best discovered in the theater; critics of the 2015 production were asked not to reveal it. The second act jumps ahead, to a Starbucks eight months later and then, years after that, to a production company's office in Los Angeles, following what became of the people who were in the office that day.

Jacobs-Jenkins knows this world: before turning to playwriting, he worked at The New Yorker, editing and writing reviews. The two-act play opens as an office satire about status and what people will do for a promotion. After its turn, it asks who has the right to tell the story of a painful event, and how media and publishing turn private tragedy into a product.

The 2015 production used six actors, and everyone except the actor playing Lorin took more than one part, so in that staging several familiar faces returned as new characters once the action moved forward in time.

Gloria was developed during Jacobs-Jenkins's residency at the Vineyard Theatre, with a workshop in January 2013. Previews began on May 28, 2015, the official opening followed on June 17, and the run was extended to July 18, 2015. The original cast was Jeanine Serralles (Gloria and Nan), Ryan Spahn (Dean and Devin), Jennifer Kim (Kendra and Jenna), Catherine Combs (Ani, Sasha and Callie), Kyle Beltran (Miles, Shawn and Rashaad) and Michael Crane (Lorin).

The Goodman Theatre in Chicago presented the Vineyard production from January 14 to February 19, 2017. That summer, Michael Longhurst directed the UK premiere at London's Hampstead Theatre. Australia followed with a Melbourne Theatre Company staging in June 2018, starring Lisa McCune, and a Sydney production in June 2019. In San Francisco, American Conservatory Theater opened the play in February 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic ended the run early.

Second Stage Theater announced the Broadway production on June 3, 2026, as part of a season that also brings a revival of The Fantasticks to the Hayes. The announced schedule put the first preview on March 17, 2027, and opening night on April 5, 2027.