“The Comeuppance,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s unsettlingly up-to-the-moment new play (at Signature Theatre’s Pershing Square Signature Center), begins with the shadow-swathed figure of a young man on an unremarkable porch. An American flag hangs in a perfunctory way from the side of the house, picking up no air. In the course of the play, the flag comes to seem less like a patriotic statement than like a gesture meant to ward off neighborly suspicion, aimed at fitting in without a fuss. When the man begins to speak, it’s not as a human being but as humanity’s great and usually unspeaking enemy: Death.
“Hello there,” he says with an almost sheepish charisma. “You and I, we have met before, though you may not recognize me. People have a tendency to meet me once and try hard to forget it ever happened, though that never works, not for very long.”
That mismatch, between meek suburban setting and high-flown transcendent stakes, is the substance of Jacobs-Jenkins’s two-stranded rope of a play. On the one hand, “The Comeuppance” is a mostly realistic portrayal of four high-school friends—some closer than others—who have gathered to “pre-game” their twenty-year high-school reunion. Like the rest of us, they’ve all recently been through a stubbornly nonfictional period of plague and isolation; grown too familiar with Zoom and other facilitators of falsely intimate distance; and come out on the other side covertly but undeniably deranged. A limo’s on its way to pick them up and take them to the party, a slightly kooky and more than a little corny sendup of the semi-marital rituals that surround the senior prom.
The guy whose body was briefly inhabited by Death at the beginning of the play is Emilio (Caleb Eberhardt). He’s an artist of growing renown, “based” in Berlin but visiting his home town in the D.C.-adjacent precincts of Maryland—not only for the reunion but also to participate in an unspecified biennial in New York. It’s tempting to deduce that we’re talking about the famous one, at the Whitney, and that Emilio’s “sound art” will appear in the follow-up to the so-called “Tear-Gas Biennial” of 2019. That year’s exhibition weathered protests by scores of artists against one of the Whitney’s vice-chairmen, Warren B. Kanders, whose company, Safariland, has manufactured armor and weapons—including tear gas—for police and military forces.
Emilio and his friends, rapidly approaching middle age, are uncomfortably subject to the swift, strong currents of history, despite the force of their individual exertions. Here are a handful of Emilio’s disappointments: the world has ground to a halt because of Covid; he knows his friends much less well than he thought he did; and a previously more or less uncontroversial route to the sheen of artistic success now seems somewhat sullied by current events. Anyway, Emilio appears less than enthused about the biennial, whichever one it is, but he’s tickled in a cynical way by the limo thing. “Isn’t the point of this dumb event reliving high school for the night?” he argues, in favor of the limo. “I think people will think it’s funny. Maybe it is a little conceptual.”
The porch and the house, where the pre-reunion is taking place, belong to Ursula (Brittany Bradford), who has borne the brunt of passing time in more obvious ways than her classmates. Her grandmother—as close as a mother—has recently died, and, as a result of diabetes, she has gone blind in one eye. She moves gingerly around the porch and worries about her friends moving things around in her house. She needs to depend on things staying where they are; but, of course, stuff’s always moving—a bump here, a slide there—just like time. Bradford, always a tidally influential performer, plays Ursula with a quiet weight that rivals even the presence of the Reaper himself. Death keeps speaking in revealing monologues throughout the play, taking turns inhabiting each actor, and thereby creating a sort of prism. Each host exposes a new aspect of his quiet activity.
Caitlin (Susannah Flood) has married a much older man, a police officer who is getting sucked into the churn of right-wing conspiracy theories. Kristina (Shannon Tyo) is a doctor with “so many . . . fucking kids”; in the course of the lockdowns, she started to rely too much on booze to calm her anxieties. She brings along her cousin Paco (Bobby Moreno), who once dated Caitlin—and, we gather, treated her quite poorly.
All but Paco were part of a friend group called M.E.R.G.E.: Multi Ethnic Reject Group. Emilio—who seems a bit like an alter ego for the artist who thought him up—emerges as a kind of centrifuge. He hasn’t seen the others since Kristina’s wedding, fifteen years ago, and he’s bristling with defensive energy. He’s condescending and confrontational, always trying to call people on their shit or their shoddy memory, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s the one who has succeeded least in moving on.
If you’re still friends with your high-school friends, you’ll recognize the rafts of cutting in-jokes and spiky insistence on perfect recall among this group. They pretend to snap the neck of someone who’s started to ramble or become too much of a downer. But their gentle razzing is undercut by their flagrant unreadiness—who among us is ever ready?—for their historical situation. They’ve lived through 9/11, endless wars, a financial crisis, and now a plague; they never reached or earned the bright future that people of this generation were trained to expect. (This play bothers me a bit, I’ll admit, because everybody in it seems to be exactly my age.)
At one point, Death gives his—and the play’s—game away. “Are you familiar with this notion of the danse macabre?” he asks suggestively. And, yes, there’s more than a hint of Thanatos at work here. Death’s insistent monologuing is a kind of invitation: each character gets a solo dance at the edge of the grave. Death’s presence creates a structure of suspense that runs parallel to the growing tension among the friends, spurred by Emilio: Death says he’s here “for work.” Sometimes my worry for the characters’ immediate safety drowned out my interest in their uncloaked ennui.
More often, though, the constant backdrop of mortality gives a lachrymose tinge to each of the characters’ intermittent outbursts. Ursula is happy to hang at her house but insists that she won’t go to the reunion. She doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to navigate so big a crowd, and it’s clear that she’s ashamed of the eye patch she has to wear. Kristina is in denial about her drinking but oddly clear—in a brilliantly delivered monologue—about the deep sources of her lostness.
You might consider some of these desperate disclosures unrealistic until you think of the effects of too much strong “jungle juice” and weed, and of the unburdening presence of close longtime friends. Eric Ting, the director, has choreographed their intimacies intricately, and with loving attention to the unspoken histories behind their interactions. That lovingness matches, in a weird way, the tone of Death’s monologues, which, despite a constant Catskills-esque patter of dark jokes about the daily vagaries and indignities of his work, often sound like a companionate essay by Jacobs-Jenkins. It’s a way of entering his own play, admitting his lordship over its characters and his interest in the pressures that they share, which are also his to bear, and all of ours.
Days after seeing “The Comeuppance,” I’m still wondering if Death really belongs in the same play as Emilio and Ursula and the rest of the insecure gang. Maybe he should have a real epic to walk around in—just as talky and smart and unsparing as Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, but stretched across the whole line between birth and life’s end. Covid, just one grim notch on such a span, still has a concussive effect in a theatre—you can feel your neighbor squirm when it comes up—but it will be truly useful in fiction when, helped along by artists like Jacobs-Jenkins, it dissolves into a metaphor. It’ll stand at the crossroads of personal life and historical time, control and contingency, the green vitality of living and the sensation of that old black robe swishing against your skin. ♦
