The Comeuppance
Photo: Dahlia Katz
Soulpepper/The Comeuppance, written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Frank Cox-O’Connell, Young Centre for the Arts, closes Nov. 23.
Critics like to bandy around words like thought-provoking and provocative when it comes to describing playwrights. When it comes to American wordsmith Branden Jacobs-Jenkins I like to add the word irritating, primarily because of all the mazes he makes you negotiate.
The night of the twentieth anniversary reunion at St. Anthony’s, a high school in the Washington DC area, becomes, in playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ hands, a ritual confrontation with mortality rather than a simple gathering of former honour students.
These four people, once separated from the larger student body as the diverse and high-achieving Merch Group (The Multi Ethnic Reject Group), now return not only to one another but to the turbulent history that shaped their adulthood.
The play deliberately spans the era from the shock of September 11th to the crisis of COVID, allowing passing references to Columbine, to years of war, to political division, and to the innumerable fractures that have marked American life since their adolescence. These echoes form the atmospheric pressure of the evening, even before the play’s supernatural device appears which is the advent of the mediaeval morality play
Jacobs-Jenkins introduces Death as an active presence.
At various points the action stops, the lighting shifts, and a voice pushes through the character onstage to reveal a truth that would never be spoken consciously. In these monologues the ancient morality play asserts itself. Death forces confession, and each person becomes the site of an interior reckoning. a personal comeuppance. The reunion becomes a modern Everyman, though it is not a divine judgement that drives the story. Rather, each person’s comeuppance is simply the truth of how he or she has travelled from childhood to adulthood, and what choices have shaped the self that stands on the porch tonight.
Emilio and Ursula
The Comeuppance
Photo: Dahlia Katz
The choice of characters, what they represent, their relationships with each other, and how they affect the dynamic of the group is very telling because they reflect what I call Jacobs-Jenkins’ impact statements on why he wrote the play.
Emilio (Mazin Elsadig) is the first to arrive on the empty stage and Shannon Lea Doyle’s remarkable set of Ursula’s house, with the front of house façade, front porch, flagstone walk and garden swing.
When Death speaks through him in the first monologue of the play, it lists every name ever given to the Devil. Emilio becomes the gadfly, the negative force, the tempter who exposes everyone else’s faults and disappointments. His need to provoke becomes corrosive.
He is the artist who left the United States thirteen years ago for Berlin and is about to open a major New York show, though he refuses to discuss his work. Ursula’s knowledge of his installation irritates him, yet she has followed his career with pride. Caitlin berates him for dismissing Ursula’s admiration. She finally shouts at him to stop being such a negative force. The group always assumed that Emilio was gay. Instead, he has fathered a child for a woman who wanted a baby, though he has no idea how much part he will play in the child’s life.
Of interest is the fact that the playwright who is Black, has the lone Black character Emilio leave the United States in disgust, have sexual identity issues, and be the so-called villain of the piece – just another of Jacobs-Jenkins’ many cryptic thematic layers to be unpacked.
Ursula (Ghazal Azarbad) has remained in the Washington DC area, in the house she once shared with her grandmother. Illness has blighted her life. Diabetes has already taken an eye, and she cannot work. She has found companionship with a former caregiver turned partner, but her life remains circumscribed. She relies on Christina for medical help and on Caitlin for financial loans. She has followed Emilio’s artistic career from afar, taking pride in his success. Yet Death reveals that her sweetness masks a fierce love of gossip, prying, and the quiet pleasure of listening to others’ pain. Her cheerful exterior hides a hunger for stories about the missteps of others.
Emilio
The Comeuppance
Photo: Dahlia Katz
Caitlin (Nicole Power), once the brightest of the group, married an ex-police officer who participated in the January 6th assault on the Capitol. She has absorbed the conservative world that surrounds him, raising his children from a former marriage, but never having children of her own. Emilio wounds her with the accusation that she allowed her husband to deny her motherhood, but Death delivers the truth: she has suffered four miscarriages and has kept that grief entirely private.
Christina (Bahia Watson), the doctor, arrives last in a limousine to take them to the reunion.
Her life has not unfolded as she once expected, and the gap between the ideal and the real sits heavily upon her. She was the devout Catholic of the group and had five children and looks after her aged parents, but the reunion exposes her profound unhappiness. She becomes the drunkest, and erupts with rage. Her life of service and sacrifice has not brought her contentment. In her Death monologue, Christina confesses an obsessive love for a beautiful lesbian neurosurgeon whose calm, capability, and poise embody everything she wishes she possessed.
Christina has also arrived with her cousin Paco (Carlos Gonzalez-Vio), who was not a member of the Merch Group.
Paco served several tours in Afghanistan and survived an improvised explosive device that killed the rest of his unit. He now suffers violent epileptic fits that can kill him at any moment. Christina keeps a watchful eye on him throughout the evening. His presence introduces the damaged body of post September 11th America. When he collapses in a seizure onstage, the moment becomes a horrifying spectacle. Paco stands as the physical reminder of the cost of the long wars that shaped this generation’s psychology and Death’s monologue is a cruel reminder.
Simon (Araya Mengesha/Voice), once part of the Merch Group, has cancelled his appearance at the reunion. He lives in the area and could easily attend, yet he refuses and everybody seems to accept this as normal. Only Emilio speaks to him on the phone. His projected likeness appears, but he remains absent. His cancellation becomes another Jacobs-Jenkins irritation thrown into the play’s mix. Why is his character there? Why will he not come? What truth can he not face? His absence resonates as another wound in the group dynamic.
Jacobs-Jenkins writes marvellously realistic dialogue and presents characters who are absolutely recognizable. It is one of his great strengths as a playwright and director Frank Cox-O’Connell and his gifted cast of actors have enshrined these real people on the stage, even to their movement and placement. More to the point, when Death speaks, we know the difference aided and abetted by Jason Hands’ skill lighting. As usual, Ming Wong’s costumes are wonderfully character specific and Olivia Wheeler’s atmospheric sound design contributes both realistic and mystical elements.
And so, to summarize this very complicated play.
We have a specific timeframe, we have a specific event, we have the supernatural.
And within these layers. the themes accumulate. Paco’s body, the politics of the past two decades, the lingering dread of COVID, the spectre of grief, the self-delusions carried from youth – all of these converge. The reunion becomes a reckoning with history’s long shadow and with individual responsibility. The characters confront not only the crises outside themselves but the crises within. Death forces truths that none would ever admit. The audience is compelled to see what the characters cannot say.
Needless to say, Death has the last word, which is to say the playwright has the last word, and the final speech is stark.
The comeuppance of the title is not divine punishment. It is the recognition of the self that each character has become. It is the personal accountability that emerges from the choices made across a lifetime. Their reckoning becomes our reckoning. It is a staggering insight into the inevitability of facing who we truly are.
And to add to the irritation factor, this playwright rarely allows escape. Is there hope? Is there forgiveness or understanding in The Comeuppance?
Or do I just accept the play as another Branden Jacobs-Jenkins disquieting theatrical experience.