Theatre in Review: The Comeuppance (Signature Theatre Company)

	Brittany Bradford, Caleb Eberhardt. Photo: Monique Carboni

The Comeuppance will do little advance the popularity of high school reunions, but it offers audiences a fresh and compelling take on the way we live now. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins assembles five high school friends, now pushing forty, on a porch in Prince George's County, Maryland for a get-together that quickly spins out of control. In their youth, most of them were self-identified members of MERG, or "multi-ethnic reject group." The plan is to have a little "pre-game" -- a few drinks and some reminiscing -- before a limo arrives to take them to their official class event.

That is, of course, if they can get off the porch in one piece; formerly a collection of bright, high-strung, socially awkward teens, in adulthood they are a jittery, emotionally battered bunch, each of them racing toward a psychological cliff. Emilio is a successful Berlin-based artist -- the script hints that his work is about to appear in the Whitney Biennial -- with an infant son. Despite his apparent glamour, however, he is edgy, easily riled, and given to blurting out casual cruelties; his skin seems to fit him like a hair shirt. Ursula, the hostess of the porch party, has had a notably bad pandemic, having lost her grandmother to COVID and an eye to diabetes; increasingly reclusive, she finds the outside world too difficult to navigate. Caitlin, possibly the brightest of them all, has ended up inexplicably married to an older man with adult children and unpalatable political alliances. "Michael was not in the group that actually stormed the Capitol," she notes, defensively.

They are joined by Kristina, Emilio's ex, now a doctor drowning in booze thanks to the horrors of the pandemic and life under lockdown with her unusually large family. "I'm an amazing Catholic," she says in one of her more lucid moments, although she isn't noticeably happy about it. Noting that Kristina spent lockdown with her husband and five children, Caitlin says, "Watching that was like the beginning of a podcast about murder." Kristina brings with her Francisco, aka Paco, Caitlin's ex, a survivor of the war in Iraq, who can joke about his PTSD until it hits him, suddenly and with bludgeoning force.

There's plenty of conflict on hand, thanks to the volatile mix of personalities with decades of unfinished business. Emilio can't stop picking on Caitlin and obviously harbors a grievance against Paco. (There's an amusing tussle about whether Paco was an "associate member" of MERG, a term that Emilio sarcastically links to the criminal gang lexicon.) But before the evening is over, Emilio's persistent dishonesty, past and present, will come to light. Meanwhile, Caitlin and Paco will exhume their buried feelings for one another. Kristina pursues her two-fisted drinking habit. Everywhere you look, bad choices are on display. But in The Comeuppance, the personal is political; everyone's troubles are linked to coming of age in an era spanned by the Columbine shootings, 9/11, the war on terror, economic crisis, the convulsions of the Trump administration, and the ravages of COVID.

In addition to Simon, a sixth friend who bails at the last minute but shows up on FaceTime to annoy them all, there is another guest, uninvited and unseen. He manifests himself when one character or another steps out of the action and addresses the audience, his or her voice distorted by sound designer Palmer Hefferan. It's the voice of Death, who, we are led to believe, has come to collect a victim. This is a bit of a dodge and the play's weakest aspect: Really, he is just making a site visit. And if one or two of his other-side-of-the-grave musings add a touch of brimstone to the proceedings, one wearies a bit of his frequent editorializing. We don't really need the Grim Reaper to point out that things aren't going well.

One especially feels like balking when Death, addressing the audience, looks back on the pandemic, saying, "It made you so much kinder and, somehow, awake. You helped each other, even if that meant just washing your hands a little more or chanting in the streets. I don't know what it was -- but for the first time, I'll confess, in a long time, I thought you were the best version of yourself." He adds, ''You were much more likable characters. What happened?" Pardon me, but which pandemic are were talking about? Apparently, not the one marked by rampant misinformation, conspiracy theories, police brutality, the politicization of simple health and safety measures, and a failed presidential coup. If the last three years represent humanity its best, God help us all.

Still, under Eric Ting's sure-handed direction, The Comeuppance emerges as both a gripping personal drama and an acute portrait of a generation suffering mental fatigue from a nonstop parade of traumas. Ting's cast is just about ideal. Brittany Bradford's Ursula is a once-vibrant woman fading into herself but not before delicately exposing the wound festering in Emilio's heart. Caleb Eberhardt's Emilio is oddly sympathetic despite being a multi-layered hypocrite; his appalled discovery that everyone thought he was a closeted teen is the funniest thing in the show. Susannah Flood's Caitlin is an intriguing enigma, disappointed in marriage, lacking a career, and haunted by a string of miscarriages, yet utterly unwilling to be judged by others. Bobby Moreno's Paco is a heartbreakingly genial loser, smilingly insisting, against the evidence, that he isn't really on the skids. Shannon Tyo's Kristina rouses herself from a jungle juice stupor to poignantly detail the ways in which the pandemic has broken her spirit: "I feel like I died, which is an idiotic thing to say because I quite literally had entire rooms full of people die on me."

Arnulfo Maldonado's set, with its prominently displayed American flag, is an effective staging ground for these multiple dark nights of the soul, aided by Amith Chandrashaker's strong use of side light. The costumes, by Jennifer Moeller and Miriam Kelleher, effectively range from Emilio's Euro-trendy casual wear to Kristina's military dress uniform. Hefferan's sound design includes bits of Emilio's sound-art installation in addition to a period-appropriate lineup of hits by Jamiroquai and The Backstreet Boys.

A canny cocktail of dark comedy and social observation, The Comeuppance is the most assured work yet from Jacobs-Jenkins, a writer who finds a fresh approach with each new play. Focusing on a narrow group of characters, he nevertheless gets at what this country has endured in the twenty-first century, in the process illuminating the madness of recent times. Not that sanity is returning anytime soon. As I write, several regions of the US are sitting under a toxic cloud caused by climate-change-induced wildfires in Canada. Right now, one must think twice about going outside. I wonder what Ursula, Emilio, and the others would have to say about that. --David Barbour