Four of the high school friends who reunite for a 20th reunion in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance are (from left rear) Christina (Shannon Tyo), Caitlin (Susannah Flood), Ursula (Brittany Bradford) and Paco (Bobby Moreno, front).
In his new play, The Comeuppance, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins checks in with his generation of Americans nearing 40. The five principals in this world premiere are gathering for their 20th high school reunion, and Jacobs-Jenkins, 38, draws his structure from notable plays that involve excessive drinking after sundown: Long Day’s Journey into Night, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Boys in the Band. In addition, those who have read Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons may recall that comeuppance figures heavily in that novel. There’s also a smidgen of The Big Chill and a larger scoop of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.
Bradford’s Ursula with Caleb Eberhardt as Emilio, who is a “sound artist” living in Berlin.
The classmates’ hostess for pre-event cocktails is Ursula (a warmly stoic Brittany Bradford), who has lost an eye to diabetes. The guests on her inviting front porch (designed by Arnulfo Maldonado) include Emilio, a “sound artist” based in Berlin who has never attended a reunion; Kristina, a doctor living in town; and Caitlin, a woman for whom Emilio carried a torch in high school. Romance never developed, though, and he ended up consoling her after she went through traumatic abuse from her boyfriend Francisco, a.k.a. Paco, who is Kristina’s cousin. Showing up unexpectedly is Paco himself, back in town after years living in California and now, following a tour in Iraq, suffering from PTSD seizures. Another classmate, Simon, cancels at the last minute, but checks in by cellphone.
There is one additional character present—the evening’s occasional narrator, who periodically takes over the body of a different character and speaks in a creepy reverb (sound design by Palmer Heffernan). He identifies himself by a litany of names from various cultures (Anubis, Muut, Ogbunabali) but for clarity ultimately settles on “Death.”
Caitlin, forgetful of the abuse she received at Paco’s hands, welcomes her ex-boyfriend back into her life. Photographs by Monique Carboni.
Like the best writers, Jacobs-Jenkins is enamored of words. In addition to the numerous terms for The Big Sleep, they include a German humdinger, Torschlusspanik, which Emilio explains: “It literally translates into ‘door closing panic.’ It’s like a fear that, as you get older, like all kind of doors are closing on you, like all these missed opportunities slipping away into oblivion.”
Jacobs-Jenkins infuses such routine set-ups and familiar borrowings with sharply drawn characters and sprinkled humor. “I don’t know why they call it the Best Coast,” the warm and gregarious Paco (Bobby Moreno) says of California. “Everything’s always on fire, and everyone accepts that as normal.”
But Paco’s presence infuriates Emilio, who is taken aback that his classmates don’t remember Paco’s cruelty to Caitlin, let alone that Paco wasn’t part of the clique they created for themselves: M.E.R.G.E., standing for Multiethnic Reject Group.
Francisco: I like to think I was just friends with everybody but, wait, was M.E.R.G.E. like an official thing? I thought that’s just something you called yourself.
Kristina: No.
Emilio: Kristina, what are you talking about?
Kristina: We weren’t actually, like, a gang, Emilio?
Emilio: Huh?! Yes we were!
Kristina: Yeah, but like ... ironically? We were just in all the same honors classes.
Thwarted by the faulty memories and corrupted nostalgia, Emilio falls back on high school pettiness: “I need to understand what’s real and what’s not real,” he tells Caitlin, who’s flirting with Paco. “I need to decide if I wasted my life or not, believing you weren’t a fucking first-class sociopath.”
Paco, his cousin Kristina and Caitlin rehash memories on Ursula’s front porch.
Emilio is a character that one might easily lose all sympathy for, but Caleb Eberhardt finds a balance between fundamental decency and acid judgmentalism, particularly on the Iraq war and military service. At times he is insufferably cruel; at others, wistfully solicitous.
But Torschlusspanik grips them all. “I’m just lost,” Kristina (Shannon Tyo) declares at one point. “I don’t know what happened to me. I feel so far away from what I understood about myself.” Paco laments that “I wish I’d figured out how to have a family, have kids.” It’s left to Simon to summarize the floundering of their generation:
It’s like too much, Columbine, 9/11, the war, the war, the endless war, then Trump, then COVID, whatever the fuck is going on in the Supreme Court ... Roe v. Wade ... I want to say it’s too much for one lifetime, but then I think: what does that even mean?
Director Eric Ting keeps the 2¼-hour play moving smoothly, modulating the confrontations and quieter moments so well that one scarcely notices there’s no intermission.
It’s left to Death, however, to put everything in context. Speaking again through Emilio, the psychopomp says, “Memory, you should know, is just a myth. Life, the present, is its expression. The present is the best part—of all things.”
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance plays through July 9 at the Pershing Square Signature Center (480 W. 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and at 8 p.m. Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit signaturetheatre.org.
Playwright: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Direction: Eric Ting
Scenic Design: Arnulfo Maldonado
Costume Design: Jennifer Moeller & Miriam Kelleher
Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker
Sound Design: Palmer Heffernan
