I loved the staged readings of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays. As a theater buff in the first place (I know the whole discography of Hamilton, and can rap Guns and Ships fluently), I really enjoyed the realness of his plays and how I felt that I had an intimate window into the conversations the characters were having.

Especially during the reading of Gloria, I really felt as if the conversation could have happened in real life. The actors were also great and really embodied the emotions and mannerisms of the characters as well. I also really liked the story itself and how it represented PTSD (with Kendra feeling uncomfortable at the Starbucks), as well as how humans have a tendency to always use things for their own personal and monetary gain. Kendra and Dean were both writing books about the traumatic event that they both were directly or indirectly victim to. I think it was also important to note that Dean denied Kendra the right to write about the experience because he did not believe the experience belonged to the her. This idea about “owning” an experience made me think. Can people really claim an experience for themselves? Just because Kendra was not in the office at the time of the shooting, does that take away her right to talk about the experience? I do not honestly believe that someone can claim an experience, I do not think that is right. Like she explained, she lost friends during the shooting, and did that not make that trauma hers, as well as Dean’s. But Dean contested that saying that she never considered the people in the office her friends, but she was the one that attended their funerals, not him. Perhaps that may be because he could not bear to see them and have to relive the experience but on some level, you would never miss the funeral of someone you truly cared about. I am still unsure about my thoughts, but that is what I loved about Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays, they kept me thinking long after I had left the theater, even though I may not experience anything close to what the characters in the play  had experienced.

I also really enjoyed the reading of his work in progress. I really wanted to see where it went and it kept me guessing about what would happen next and what his end goal would be.