By: Rebeca Ventura🇸🇻
Tickets of "The Comeuppance" for the Sept. 15 showing. (Rebeca Ventura)
After 20 years, a high school reunion is bound to bring up years of repressed and forgotten memories, bubbling up under the surface. Lost love, reignited tensions and fiery tempers run rampant on a porch in Washington, D.C. the night a friend group pre-games their reunion, doubling as the first time seeing each other after 15 long years.
“The Comeuppance,” written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, is a poignant and magnificent tale about relationships, death and trauma. The play follows a group of five friends, the self-proclaimed “multiethnic reject group”.
Each character; Emilio, Ursula, Katelyn, Paco and Kristina, have their own struggles and insecurities they have struggled with over the years following their high school graduation.
However, there is another entity present at the pre-game, one that nobody can see but feel. Death, or rather a folkloric interpretation of death, inhabits each character at different parts of the play and speaks directly to the audience.
In the show that I watched, on Sept. 15, Emilio was played by Jordan Bellow, Ursula by Alana Raquel Bowers, Kristina by Taysha Marie Canales, Paco by Jaime Maseda, and Katelyn by Sarah Gliko. In this iteration of the play, Paco and Kristina are played by Latinos, Emilio and Ursula are played by Black actors, and Katelyn's actors ethnicity is unknown.
Jacobs-Jenkins beautifully weaves together five stories, pulling the audience along a turbulent trail as he reveals a bit more about each character. Alongside their personal journeys, he also adds elements relevant to the social climate of today. Recurring themes of gun violence, military service, mental illness, reproductive rights and politics bubble up through the tension and add subtext to their taut conversations.
The pandemic also permeates the backdrop of the entire play, its consequences seeping into each character’s core. Themes of fear, isolation and PTSD coat the entire play as you watch the former friends delve deeper and deeper into their conversation.
A 20th high school reunion is an interesting enough premise, but Jacobs-Jenkins is able to go beyond expectations. The entire play takes place on Ursula’s front porch, but you travel through time and space. You go back to tough times in high school, the battlefields in Afghanistan, the frontlines of the coronavirus as a nurse during the height of the pandemic, and see the future of our beloved quintet.
Despite its heavy themes, Jacobs-Jenkins throws in perfect one-liners and the actors deliver a perfect punchline, allowing you to give a big laugh. Some chuckles may be from shock, but others are deep from the belly.
The play takes place at the Woolly-Mammoth Theater in Washington, D.C. It is a wonderful and accommodating space for diverse theater. “The Comeuppance,” showing from Sept. 8 - Oct. 6, is a must watch for anybody interested in theater. It is heartwarming, shocking, sorrowful and leaves you contemplating long after the curtain goes down.
While none of the main characters in “The Comeuppance” are explicitly Latino, their struggles can be identified with the Latino struggle. The play successfully and subtly shifts the white hegemony of theater by introducing a cast of characters that are so clearly ethnic. By telling our stories and placing importance on the struggles of Latinos, our lives are validated in meaningful ways. Anybody who is non-white has the ability to identify deeply with each character in “The Comeuppance,” broadening Jacobs-Jenkins’ impact.
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