{"id":1453,"date":"2018-12-05T23:14:15","date_gmt":"2018-12-05T23:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-the-words\/?page_id=1453"},"modified":"2024-08-05T21:07:26","modified_gmt":"2024-08-05T21:07:26","slug":"english-honor-society-takes-students-to-mixed-blood-theatre","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/the-words-december-2018\/english-honor-society-takes-students-to-mixed-blood-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"English Honor Society Takes Students to Mixed Blood Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"

Miriam Moore-Keish \u201919<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Prescient<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The English Honor Society hosted its annual theater trip on December 1st to see <\/span>Prescient Harbingers: Gloria<\/span><\/i> at Mixed Blood Theatre. <\/span>Prescient Harbingers<\/span><\/i>, a response to the midterm elections, is composed of three full-length plays by African-American playwrights \u201cglued together by an African American male prism, through contrast, and via Second Amendment violations\u201d (Mixed Blood Theatre). Audience members could see all three: \u201cHooded,\u201d \u201cGloria,\u201d and \u201cHype Man,\u201d or pick and choose. <\/span>Rohan Preston\u2019s review of the trio <\/span><\/a>appeared in the Star Tribune, reading, \u201cWhile the festival title posits these as \u2018harbingers,\u2019 they are less about what\u2019s coming than what\u2019s here, percolating uneasily in our souls.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

EHS offered the opportunity for English majors and minors to see <\/span>Gloria<\/span><\/i>. Written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and directed by Lavina Jadhwani, <\/span>Gloria<\/span><\/i> combines humor and cynicism to mock print media.<\/span> The Mixed Blood website<\/span><\/a> says, \u201cAn adrenaline rush of a show,<\/span> Gloria<\/span><\/i> is a shocking, hilarious and spectacularly honest play set among the hyperambitious cubicle dwellers of a once-great magazine. Like journalism, it asks \u2018What is crisis but an opportunity?\u2019 and \u2018Who has the right to tell whose story and for how much money?\u2019\u201d For scholars of language and story, the themes in Gloria<\/em> correspond to our work. What stories are we telling? And are they ours to tell?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winner of the Obie Award for Best New American Play and recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award, Jacobs-Jenkins feels a need to tell stories. Gloria<\/em> tells the story of work, of being what Jacobs-Jenkins calls \u201ca desk slave\u201d in Exeunt Magazine. <\/span>In an<\/span> interview with Bomb Magazine<\/span><\/a>, Jacobs-Jenkins says, \u201cI think the fiction suffered from having read The <\/em><\/span>New Yorker<\/span><\/i> too much\u2026There\u2019s a funny way black artists are made to believe they\u2019re only capable of writing about themselves, so I was interested in trying to write a play where the authorship\u2014or our ideas of authorship\u2014and its \u2018blackness\u2019 is somehow swallowed up or consumed by the play itself. All the work I love is made by artists that build their house and are only the ghost of it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The plot of <\/span>Gloria<\/span><\/i> centers around the copyediting office for the culture department of a magazine. The first 50 minutes of the show feature mundane office gossip and coworker arguments. A fact-checker, Lorin, complains about the magazine: \u201cWe just write about other people to think about ourselves!\u201d <\/span>he grumbles. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Honor Murphy \u201919 told me at intermission, \u201cIt was getting a little boring… so boring,\u201d until Gloria, a seldom onstage, \u201cweird\u201d editor in the office shoots eight characters off stage, two characters on stage, and then herself. Murphy says that \u201cit was a great way to mirror the experience of the people there. It was sudden.\u201d Jacobs-Jenkins writes conversations full of microaggressions and then an unexpected act of trauma to bring to light both the passivity of violence and its existence in the midst of passivity.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second act focuses on the response to the killings. The three survivors of the shooting all write books about their experience. They fight about whether print media should focus on the victim or the perpetrator. A publisher convinces one of Gloria\u2019s former coworkers, Nan, to write her narrative of survival asking, \u201cHow have you never considered turning this into something?\u201d Nan responds with, \u201cWhat do you think I could get?\u201d Conversation calls back to Lorin\u2019s complaint that all media is an excuse to think about oneself. In the last scene he looks past the heads of the audience members and says, \u201cIt could have been any one of us.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bethany Catlin \u201919 came to the show not knowing its content, even forgetting about the title. After realizing that the show is named after the perpetrator of the defining act of violence, she said to me, \u201cIt\u2019s about the commodification of trauma! It\u2019s about how people reshape their lives to what is most interesting!\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The show reminds us of the fallacy of empathy. Yes, atrocities could have happened to any of us. But our job is not to always think about ourselves. Our job is not to tell other people’s\u2019 stories through our lives. Sometimes our job is to listen. <\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Miriam Moore-Keish \u201919 The English Honor Society hosted its annual theater trip on December 1st to see Prescient Harbingers: Gloria at Mixed Blood Theatre. Prescient Harbingers, a response to the midterm elections, is composed of three full-length plays by African-American playwrights \u201cglued together by an African American male prism, through contrast, and via Second Amendment […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":913,"featured_media":0,"parent":1447,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1453","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/913"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1453"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7625,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1453\/revisions\/7625"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}