How Branden Jacobs-Jenkins got from Alice Munro stories to his ‘fear and loathing’ play ‘Gloria’

He’s one of the most talked-about American playwrights of the last decade. His plays consistently push the boundaries of theatrical form and have included controversial practices such as blackface.

Who would have thought that a key inspiration for his play “Gloria” would be the short stories of Canadian author Alice Munro?

“I mainlined her stuff!” laughed Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, recalling the period in the middle of the last decade when he was living in Berlin, reading loads of Munro stories. Jacobs-Jenkins was also writing plays that included “Gloria,” which has its Canadian premiere Friday in an ARC theatre company production in association with Crow’s Theatre.

“Gloria,” described by the New York Times as a “whip-smart satire of fear and loathing,” is directed by André Sills, a celebrated actor and ARC resident artist who is making his professional directing debut.

Munro, Jacobs-Jenkins said, is very good at “using realistic techniques to give us a sense of immersion and then she often — through some kind of technical move — alienates us from that experience and forces us to re-examine our experience of the real … I wanted to see if I could make a play that somehow honoured or echoed or rhymed with the kind of experiences I’d had” reading her stories.

The first act of “Gloria” is set in the offices of a Manhattan magazine circa the mid-2010s. Jacobs-Jenkins worked at the New Yorker magazine for a few years after graduating from Princeton University and drew from that experience in writing the play. This goes back to his interest in theatrical realism, which he noted “is ultimately rooted in this idea that the environment shapes the person … and if what you do every day is sit in a cubicle for eight hours, that does become who you are.”

While part of the entertainment value of the first act is observing the characters sniping at and undercutting each other, Jacobs-Jenkins wasn’t looking to join a lineage of toxic workplace plays by the likes of Neil LaBute. “I didn’t like the idea of a play that was about people being rude to each other … I wanted to upend that spirit in some ways, or really go down into that hole with it and see where it would take us.”

Sills became familiar with Jacobs-Jenkins’ work when he played the leading role in “An Octoroon” at the Shaw Festival in 2017. At one point in that play, Sills, playing a character named BJJ who is a stand-in for Jacobs-Jenkins himself, put on whiteface; a white actor put on redface and an Indigenous actor put on blackface, all part of a highly metatheatrical deconstruction of the 19th-century melodrama “The Octoroon.”

“The way we did ‘An Octoroon’ at Shaw, there was basically no fourth wall,” said Sills — that is, the actors spoke directly to the audience.

“‘Gloria’ puts up a fourth wall, but somehow is still able to penetrate it and speak to the audience in a sense, and ask big questions of them,” he said. “The opportunity of that seemed very, very delicious.”

As in “An Octoroon,” “Gloria” audiences are “desperately looking for the person they can connect to,” but the writing and characterization keep this search for identification on the move, Sills said.

His cast found the play “hilarious, but at the same time when we’re putting it on its feet we are also discovering real moments of humanity. And as soon as that happens, they’re pulling the rug out from under you again … they punch you in the throat with a certain line of text that follows.”

Sills has chosen to retain the play’s setting in the mid-2010s — pre-Trump, pre-pandemic, pre-global racial reckoning — and said there are certain aspects that may resonate even more than when it was first staged.

“This play puts the mirror up to see how we talk to each other, how we deal with each other, how we deal with trauma or how we don’t deal with trauma.”

“People are going to recognize some of the interactions between these characters as being about privilege and perceptions of privilege, and the way that people, their identities, their affinities are mobilized or weaponized against them,” agreed Jacobs-Jenkins. “At the time that this premiered, people didn’t quite see that level of the play, but I notice over time it’s somehow become more of the conversation around it.”