It feels like just yesterday that ‘millennial’ was synonymous with ‘young’. But in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins rancorous dark comedy, a group of late thirtysomething American friends marvel at how much they’ve all lived through: 9/11, Iraq, Columbine, the Covid pandemic. And that’s on top of the baggage they’re all still carrying from high school, which they can’t even remember clearly, but has shaped their lives nonetheless. Oh and Death – as in, the actual Grim Reaper – is knocking about, occasionally possessing one of the five pals in order to deliver a monologue to the audience.
The play’s catalyst is Emilio (Anthony Welsh), who has been living in Europe as an artist for over a decade, but is back in town for his twentieth-anniversary high school reunion. Has he moved on from school? He has absolutely not moved on from school: whatever his intention was when he returned, he is soon poking at old trauma, relitigating ancient grudges, and starting fights over things that happened over half his lifetime ago.
Not that he lacks reasons. His circle of friends – who used to dub themselves the Multi Ethnic Reject Group or MERGE (‘it’s a soft g’) – have gathered at the home of Tamara Lawrance’s Ursula for drinks, ahead of taking an ironic prom-style ‘party limo’ to the reunion. But Emilio is dumbfounded by the presence of Paco (Ferdinand Kingsley), the older ex-boyfriend of his erstwhile best friend Caitlin (Yolanda Kettle). Abusive to Caitlin in the past, Paco is now a somewhat pitiable figure, combining infuriating used car salesman-style humour with debilitating PTSD from his several tours of Iraq. Infuriated at Caitlin’s lack of anger at Paco, Emilio starts to tear the whole happy gathering apart.
Finely acted, ‘The Comeuppance’ is a dark, droll, somewhat contemplative comedy about how a generation gets old (or at least, middle-aged). It isn’t about five people contemplating their own mortality (though Jacobs-Jenkins alludes to this aspect of ageing amusingly via the whole Death thing). Instead it’s about what it means to have lived a much longer life than you once had; about the ability to look back on your past as history; about fallibility of memory; about the human ability to move on (or not).
Eric Ting’s slightly staid production – originally staged in New York last year with a different cast – feels a bit thesis-y in places. The group’s determination to talk about their experience of the pandemic feels a little forced, as does the fact that they’re more inclined to talk about their memories of Columbine and 9/11 than, you know, what they actually did at school. The second half ends up getting somewhat bogged down in Emelio’s rage: it feels like it should be nimbler.
And I’m not sure what the character of Death adds, although having the entirely Brit cast drop into their natural accents for these monologues adds an enjoyably puckish texture that contrasts with the sourness elsewhere. Jacobs-Jenkins made his name with high-concept dark comedies like ‘An Octoroon’, and one wonders if he tossed the Grim Reaper in because he felt a bit embarrassed at having written a naturalistic drama.
It’s a sidelong look at ageing, at its heart underpinned by a wry amusement at the very idea of millennials getting old. And the fact Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t feel like the sort of playwright who writes a play about this sort of thing is precisely what makes ‘The Comeuppance’ so compelling.
