I’m around the same age as the characters in “The Comeuppance,” a searing new play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins about a group of friends pregaming on the night of their 20th high school reunion in Prince George’s County in 2022. Both productions I’ve seen — last year’s world premiere at the Signature Theatre in New York and the superb new staging by director Morgan Green at Woolly Mammoth Theatre — have sent me staggering into the street, as though lobotomized of my innermost fears.
Review by Naveen Kumar
The play’s dissection of early middle age — of the melancholy of reckoning with irreversible decisions and the inevitable decline ahead — is so gutting that it may become as much a personal touchstone for this time in my life as my own experiences.
Germans, of course, have a very specific vocabulary for the feelings being explored here: torschlusspanik, or panic over the foreclosure of possibilities, and the more common schadenfreude, which may tickle older generations by this point thinking, “Welcome to the party, kids.”
Emilio (Jordan Bellow), a storm cloud of an artist who decamped to Berlin more than a decade ago, explains these German terms to Ursula (Alana Raquel Bowers), who stayed to care for her late grandmother and has lost vision in one eye to diabetes. They’re on Ursula’s porch waiting for the rest of their crew, known back then as MERG, or the multiethnic reject group. But another presence they can’t see has already made a chilling impression.
Death is the play’s narrator and he possesses each character by turns, like a ventriloquist trying out a menagerie of human puppets. Inhabiting Emilio, he assures us in basement tones that we’ve met before: “People have a tendency to see me once and try hard to forget,” he says. Death, like any audience member, is a voyeur with a weakness for gossip. And there’s plenty about to be spilled.
“The Comeuppance,” co-produced here with the Wilma Theater, is as much a dishy drama of rekindled flames and rivalries as it is a meditation on mortality. Emilio is a relentless instigator with his sights especially set on Katelyn (Sarah Gliko), a homemaker married to a much older man, and on Paco (Jaime Maseda), Katelyn’s ex, a veteran disguising his wounds with charm. Paco’s cousin Kristina (Taysha Marie Canales), a fellow veteran who’s now a doctor with five kids, insisted on the pregame and wants to party like they did when their lives were all promise and few consequences.
People who grew up together, and have since grown apart, know how to pick at each other’s scabs. For better and worse, old friends can be mirrors for phantom versions of ourselves that no longer exist. Anyone who’s been to a double-digit reunion can understand either Kristina’s overzealousness to relive the past or Emilio’s begrudging participation in what he calls a “dark ritual of the soul.”
Green’s production, which will play the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia (where she is co-artistic director) from Nov. 19 to Dec. 8, leans into that spectral vibe to arresting effect. A lone chair sits on Ursula’s spare front porch, and several layers of black fringe curtains line the back of the stage like a penumbra between this world and the next (the set is by Jian Jung). Stark shadows and low, unsettling vibrations accompany Death’s cameos, his presence tearing through any illusion of permanence or tranquility. (Llighting is by Minjoo Kim and sound by Jordan McCree.)
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The interruptions grow less frequent and more startling, as though the friends being together might keep the Grim Reaper at bay. (The play itself casts an unbroken spell, running for a gripping and intermission-less 2 hours and 10 minutes.) The conceit of taking turns channeling Death slyly reveals more about each character and gives the excellent cast a delicious range to play. Their performances also achieve an uncanny transparency through time: It’s possible to glimpse the outlines of malleable teenagers through the yearning of their adult wants and regrets.
“The Comeuppance” assumes a wide aperture, encompassing the many paradigm shifts — Columbine, 9/11, wars without end and, most recently, the pandemic — that have molded a generation into adulthood around the contours of death. “How did I get it into my head,” an absent friend asks on speakerphone, “that life was supposed to be something other than this?” It’s a question that everyone who loses their innocence has to face.
The Comeuppance, through Oct. 6 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington. 2 hours, 10 minutes with no intermission. woollymammoth.net.
