There’s a generational valence to his fixation on the embarrassment of living—a millennial complaint about the awkwardness of having been groomed for plum roles in an end-of-history pageant that never came to be. In “Gloria” (2015), set at a magazine whose young staffers blame “post-war glutton babies” for squandering their futures, a copy editor feels so disgraced by the low attendance at her housewarming party that she shoots up the office. “Girls” (2019), an adaptation of “The Bacchae,” reimagines Euripides’ uptight king as an incel streamer maddened by his parents’ boomerish decadence. Jacobs-Jenkins’s keen ear for the anxieties of our age is equally attuned to those of ages gone by; in adaptations like “An Octoroon” and “Everybody” (2017), based on a medieval morality play, the shock of self-consciousness summons the ghosts of theatre’s history. “I cringe at my past,” he joked in one of our conversations. Yet what is cringe but the beginning of self-knowledge?
