Review: ‘Gloria: A Life,’ Starring Ms. Steinem and Her Audience

NEW YORK — Something powerful is happening at the Daryl Roth Theater in Union Square — but it isn’t so much the play that opened there on Thursday night as the audience.

That play, by Emily Mann, is “Gloria: A Life,” a paint-by-numbers portrait of Gloria Steinem. It would make a useful introduction to the feminist trailblazer for those who know little about her remarkable overlapping careers as a journalist, activist and “wandering organizer” for the revolution.

For those who already know the story, perhaps from Steinem’s memoir “My Life on the Road,” the play itself — as opposed to the experience of it — does not have much new to add. Even if it wanted to, it couldn’t; Steinem’s professional life (the personal details are mostly omitted here) has been way too busy and fruitful to cover any part of it in depth.

Instead we get something of a historical pageant or three-dimensional animatronic exhibit. Certainly Christine Lahti, in the title role, looks like a museum replica of Steinem, from tinted aviator glasses to black bell-bottoms. (The costumes are by Jessica Jahn; the wigs by Anne Ford-Coates.) Lahti also gets the emotional style right — a style I would call assertive warmth with a hefty chaser of self-deprecation.

That self-deprecation helps leaven the hagiography here, but it’s hard not to be impressed all over again by Steinem’s achievements, and what she achieved them in spite of. Among the greatest hits rehearsed are her early reporting on the women’s movement, her involvement in the creation of Ms. magazine and her championing of intersectional feminism before it even had that name.

Hits in the other sense are not ignored either, and these, no matter how familiar, still manage to shock. I cringed again at the story of a New York Times editor who suggests to Steinem that they discuss her work “in a hotel room this afternoon.” Evergreen in its awfulness, too, is the 1963 cab ride in which Gay Talese explains to Saul Bellow, as Steinem sits between them, “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well ... Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”

Six actors play the non-Gloria characters in most of these scenes, shifting swiftly from male to female, young to old, bemused to bereaved. Among those whose embodiment feels most powerful are Florynce Kennedy (Patrena Murray) and Wilma Mankiller (DeLanna Studi) — black and Native American feminist leaders too often absent from standard histories.

For reasons that are surprisingly similar, Steinem’s mother also looms large. Ruth Steinem (Joanna Glushak) started out as a journalist herself, writing under a man’s name — but gave it up to be a mother. Her ambition and self-erasure seem to provide both a positive and negative model for her daughter.

But even these powerful stories, let alone the hundreds of others, get short shrift in Diane Paulus’ staging, as the actors quickly dissolve back into the ensemble and the anecdote parade passes on without follow-up. (We never learn anything more about Ms., for instance, after its preview issue in 1971.) This gives “Gloria: A Life” the wedged-in, medley feel of a jukebox musical.

Or maybe it would be more apt to compare it to a consciousness-raising group, the kind in which Steinem found her own voice by listening to others. “Social justice movements start with people sitting in a circle,” she says in the play, and sure enough, the amphitheater layout of the Daryl Roth space is, in Amy Rubin’s intimate design, as close to a circle as possible. The stage area in the middle, carpeted with Persian rugs like Steinem’s own apartment, is the kind of place where you’d like to curl up to share stories and, in sharing them, amplify them.

That, astonishingly, is exactly what happens in the second part of the evening: a 20-minute talking circle in which audience members are invited (but in no way coerced) to share their responses to what they’ve seen.

Not everyone who chose to speak on Tuesday night observed the Black Lives Matter principles enunciated at the start of the circle: “Lead with love, low ego, high impact, move at the speed of trust.” But what happened next took the raw materials of the play and turned them into thrilling community drama. Many of the women who spoke — no men did — had Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation on their minds as they looked for ways to deal with their rage.

At each performance, the talking circle is kicked off by a special guest, and on Tuesday the guest responded to the despair in the room by describing herself as a “hope-aholic.” She too was angry, she said, but buoyed by the incalculably greater number of women fighting for their rights today than when she started. “I have hope because it used to be so much worse,” she explained, and in that moment the hope seemed contagious.

Of course, this was Steinem herself; she had emerged at the end of the play proper in much the same outfit Lahti was wearing.

“I’m not sure I can follow myself,” she said slyly.

More’s the pity.

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'Gloria: A Life'

At the Daryl Roth Theater, Manhattan; 1-800-982-278, gloriatheplay.com. Running time: 2 hours.

By Emily Mann; directed by Diane Paulus; sets by Amy Rubin; costumes by Jessica Jahn; lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew; sound by Robert Kaplowitz and Andrea Allmond; projections by Elaine J. McCarthy; Ana M. Garcia, production stage manager. Presented by Daryl Roth, Jenna Segal, Elizabeth Armstrong, Fearless Productions, Sally Horchow and Alix L.L. Ritchie.

Cast: Christine Lahti (Gloria Steinem), Joanna Glushak, Fedna Jacquet, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, Petrena Murray, DeLanna Studi and Liz Wisan (Ensemble).