Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ new play The Comeuppance is a bit too topical, a bit too on-the-nose, and one wonders how well it will age. Set in 2022, the text name-checks nearly every conflagration that has beset the United States in the past 20 years, from 9/11 to 1/6, without engaging too deeply with any of them—burgeoning gun violence perhaps being the exception. It takes place on the front porch of Ursula, one of five friends and enemies meeting up before their twentieth high school reunion, the porch well realized by a minimal set designed by Jian Jung. The show is heavily expository in roughly its first half; call it, maybe, a multi-ethnic Return of the Secaucus 5.
Jacobs-Jenkins, himself approaching middle age, confronts the prospect of death head on with this work. The turning-40s is the age when many of us realize that we’re not actually going to live forever. He brings Death on stage by a tidy maneuver, one easier done than described. The (what—spirit? mojo? voice?) quintessence of Death passes among the five players, who each from time to time break character and address the audience directly as Death—starting with Emilio (expressive Jordan Bellow), who may serve as the playwright’s voice. Emilio is a conceptual/sound/installation artist working in Berlin; he has abandoned his early work in photography, saying that he had become “tired of mimesis.”
Emerging from the high-energy agita and decades-old recriminations, Kristina (TayshaMarie Canales) has a lovely monologue in which she questions the turns that her life has taken.
The title of the play is a bit of a tease, or perhaps a misdirection, or maybe a suspension.
- The Comeuppance, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Morgan Green, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Wilma Theater, Washington