Caleb Eberhardt, Bobby Moreno, Shannon Tyo, Susannah Flood, and Brittany Bradford in The Comeuppance. Photo: Monique Carboni

The members of the high school class of 2002 that comprise the company (four of the five, anyway, plus a tagalong who’s the cousin of one and the ex-boyfriend of another) of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance can measure their journey from adolescence to early middle age as spanning from Columbine to COVID, with a significant pit stop at 9/11 and a long sojourn in the Forever War. It’s no wonder Death shows up as the proverbial uninvited guest. He’s a narrator of sorts, shifting from body to body with the snap of a spotlight, an echo of harsh reverb in his voice, and a few magic tricks up his sleeve. She’s the invisible specter at all of our feasts, here made visible with an omniscient insight into the characters’ past and future brushes with mortality, from traumatic births to family losses to the work of as a doctor. Any reunion of necessity looks back at youth from a point statistically closer to death, but the story we want to tell about them tends to focus on the triumphs more than the tribulations of the intervening years. Not here–here, as with many of Jacobs-Jenkins’s other plays, the consciousness of mortality suffuses the whole; the thumb of death gets put on the scale. We feel the new health problems, and losses of grandparents or aging parents, and miscarriages, and the traumatic aftermath of military service more keenly than the marriages and children born and raised and professional successes. 

It feels snarky to call The Comeuppance an early entry into the canon of works that look at millennial midlife crisis, but I don’t at all mean that to be millennial-bashing. Our pop understanding of the generations sometimes seems to have frozen the millennials as “kids today,” and, well, they’re just about in their forties. Jacobs-Jenkins locates these characters with granular precision, and the invocation of time and place gives us insight into them and their worldview: The way in which more members of a group that graduated high school in 2002 in the DC area got nudged toward the military than, say, my own upper-middle-class peers in the NYC suburbs 15 years earlier. The way social media is woven into their lives, but they still don’t feel especially attached to it. The way gender has played out for them, with one of the women having both the most successful career and five children, while the other two women in the group both got somewhat bogged down with caregiving, one for the grandmother who raised her–and then with her own health–and the other for the children that came from her husband’s first marriage. The men, meanwhile, are adrift in different ways, one of them cutting off his family and leaving the country to pursue artistic ambitions, the other leaving for the military and never making it back whole. None of them is settled into and comfortable in an “adult” life, though some of them at first seem to be. 

An impromptu gathering as a “pregame” to a twentieth high-school reunion forms the mostly real-time action of The Comeuppance, with Death hovering as a psychopomp (as he styles himself) around the edges. It’s fall 2022, and the onetime members of MERG (it’s a soft g), the “Multi Ethnic Rejects Group” of smart kids from their suburban DC high school are meeting up on the front porch of one of their members who still lives in the area. (Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t define the ethnicity or race of specific characters beyond labeling the ensemble a multi-ethnic group; one of the strengths that director Eric Ting and the excellent cast bring to the piece is the way that we feel the nuance of lived history of each character in the racialized body of the actor playing them without it ever being textual in the piece.)

All the members of MERG thought they’d get away from this place, and yet most of them didn’t. Emilio (Caleb Eberhardt) did: a successful artist, he lives in Berlin, has a show opening in New York, and just had a baby. But the three women remain in the area: Kristina (Shannon Tyo) served in the military and became a doctor, just like she planned–but she also married young, had five kids, and burned out right into a drinking problem during COVID. She followed her straight and narrow path so tightly that she’s never considered what she might want, and now she’s exhausted and miserable. Ursula (Brittany Bradford) stayed to take care of the grandmother who raised her, but in the wake of that death, her own health has taken a sharp decline and she’s now lost most of her vision to diabetes. Caitlin (Susannah Flood) married a much older cop right out of college, and raised two stepkids, who are now the age she was when she married their father. She might hate her husband; she definitely hates his politics. (The fifth member, Simon, who seems to be the emotional anchor of the group, canceled at the last minute and appears only in a couple of phone calls.) 

And then there’s Paco (Bobby Moreno), a few years ahead of them in high school but connected because he’s Kristina’s cousin and was Caitlin’s high school boyfriend, a troubled relationship that continues to torture Emilio for reasons even he doesn’t entirely understand. But one thing we realize over the course of the play is that none of these people understand much of what they did back then. They didn’t know themselves all that well when they were eighteen–who does?–and now some old patterns and friendships have calcified without ever getting any more honest or deeper. “It’s hard to trust all that stuff you felt. When you were young,” Emilio says.

Kristina and Caitlin have been supportive of Ursula as her health has declined, but they don’t know she’s dating anyone, just like Ursula and Caitlin don’t know the depths of Kristina’s despair and Kristina and Ursula have never had anything useful to say about Caitlin’s husband. And for Emilio, who hasn’t been back in 15 years, most of what’s left of these relationships is contempt and lies. He doesn’t even want to talk about his art with these people–with the possible exception of Ursula. The piece begins and ends with Emilio and Ursula alone (with Death), and they’re much gentler with each other than either is with the group at large. 

We’re primed, the whole time, for the hammer of death to fall—for the simmering conflict to end with a punch thrown that freakishly breaks someone’s skull, or a sudden heart attack, or a car crash in the limo Kristina insists that they take to the reunion. Death keeps popping back in, speaking through one character or another, never letting us forget her presence, and yet taunting us by withholding that resolution. There’s nothing dramatic, nothing narratively definitive. We’re left with painful foreshadowing.

Eric Ting’s production gives both the eerieness of Death and the mundane melodramas working out between the characters their due. An intermissionless two hours plus is hard to pull off, but you wouldn’t want to interrupt the real-time spooling out of the first act, as these old friends come together and smash back apart, and the second act is little more than a brief coda. Arnulfo Maldonado’s front porch set keeps the ensemble tightly contained in a plane much shallower than the space would allow, which lets physical tension build among them while the acting remains subtle. There’s a swing and chairs and yet somehow people mostly end up perched on the railings and the stairs, never quite getting comfortable for long. Amith Chandrashaker’s lights and Palmer Hefferan’s sound design capture both the mundanity of the night and its moments of eldritch energy. But above all, there’s a sureness and deftness of touch in Ting’s (warranted) confidence with the actors, a deep sense of knowledge of the characters that gives the ensemble a sense of roots and all the layers of connection. You feel the years between them but also the discomfort they all feel in themselves and among one another. I’ve raved about most of this cast in other contexts, perhaps particularly Shannon Tyo and Bobby Moreno, but all of them do excellent work: Tyo in taking Kristina from competent caretaker to sloppy-drunk breakdown to a deep midnight of the soul in one monologue. Moreno in Paco’s genuine wish to turn his damage and his shame into something okay. Brittany Bradford in the constant effort to hold her boundaries around these old friends, while feeling them slipping away. Susannah Flood, still wearing the aura of the girl for whom everything came easy even as she acknowledges she’s just making the best of it. Caleb Eberhardt, angry at himself for not being able to let go of the past, angry at everyone else for taking him back there. (Though Eberhardt sometimes felt tentative on the lines or the blocking in ways that distracted.) 

A comeuppance is: “A deserved rebuke or penalty: deserts.” What is it that we all deserve here? Death taunts us at one point by reminding us we were all briefly “much more likeable characters” in the extremis of the pandemic. “I could tell that you felt me close,” he–as Emilio this time–says. “It was nice to see you so thoughtful, so different….What happened?” But having Death lurking around their shoulders doesn’t make anyone nicer here; their mortality taunts them silently. We may think they’re behaving badly, that they’re living shitty lives, or that they’re doing the best they can–but that deserved penalty awaits anyway. But in the play’s final moments, when Ursula and Emilio find–after a bitter fight among the group–a moment of quiet communion, we think, maybe that’s the only way to put off that rebuke for a little while.