The closest I have come to attending a high-school reunion was a wedding some years ago at which two of my former classmates were married. At the reception, I saw people I hadn’t thought about in years, including one who spent most of the night drunkenly demanding to know who remembered her from school (I did, vaguely, though this her behaviour made me wish I didn’t). As with the reuniting of families, the coming together of old friends has a way of reducing and regressing us, forcing to the surface long-suppressed grievances, regrets, and longings, not to mention newly refreshed competitive streaks. Such events are, in other words, fertile ground for dramatists with an eye for human folly.

Lawrence Kasdan mined school reunion tropes to popular (if not critical) success in The Big Chill (1983), a film which parlayed baby-boomer nostalgia into a lament for the lost idealism of the 1960s. In The Comeuppance, American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins attempts something similar for my generation, which is to say millennials born between the early-1980s and mid-1990s. Whereas The Big Chill softened its portrait of generational disillusionment with a warm screenplay and banging 1960s soundtrack, Jacobs-Jenkins’s vision is a distinctly hard-edged one, reminding us that my generation’s high-school years were bookended by seismic eruptions of violence, namely the Columbine massacre and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Comeuppance, unusually for a contemporary play, also attempts something of a reckoning with the Covid-19 pandemic, an event that, in 2025, seems subject to a kind of mass, and perhaps wilful, cultural amnesia.

The play, which premièred off-Broadway at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre in 2023, sees five friends gather in the hours before a limousine is due to arrive – ironically, of course – to whisk them away to their twenty-year reunion. The house, in the suburbs outside Washington DC, belongs to Ursula (AYA), who is blind in one eye from the effects of diabetes. The first to arrive is Emilio (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor), a successful multidisciplinary artist now based in Berlin, followed by Caitlin (Julia Grace), Kristina (Tess Masters), and Francisco (Kevin Hofbauer). A sixth friend, Simon (Douglas Lyons), joins the pre-event drinks periodically by video call, having given his apologies for the event proper. Collectively, the group is known as MERGE, a not-quite acronym for ‘multiethnic reject group’. These are not the cool kids grown up but, rather, the misfits whose shared experience of social ostracism bonded them for life.

The Comeuppance (photograph by Cameron Grant - Parenthesy)

Each has, in their own way, become damaged and disillusioned by the passing of time. Kristina, the group’s ostensible matriarch, is a nurse traumatised and driven to alcoholism by military service and the Covid pandemic. Francisco, a veteran with multiple tours of Iraq under his belt, suffers from PTSD-induced seizures. Ursula, meanwhile, is beset by health problems (Jacobs-Jenkins’s view of the body’s precipitous decline in early middle age is frankly alarming), and Emilio and Caitlin are both troubled, volatile souls with a gradually revealed history of complex emotional entanglements. None of them, it seems, has settled into adulthood or child-rearing with much in the way of equanimity. The play’s key word may be one taught to Emilio by his German partner – torschlusspanik, literally meaning ‘gate-closing panic’ and capturing the sense of diminishing opportunities and a dread of ageing.                 

As with Jacobs-Jenkins’s previous plays, most notably An Octoroon (2014), what could have been a naturalistic comedy-drama is instead spiced with absurdism and metatheatricality. Death looms over the play as a kind of distributed psychopomp, assuming control of the friends’ bodies and voices as needed to commentate on events and to philosophise about mortality. In these moments, the actors pick up a microphone in the manner of a stand-up comic, a spotlight beamed at them as they drop back into their native Australian accents, their voices electronically distorted. We have seen this device before – Australian audiences will recall the similarly introspective yet wisecracking Death in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief – but here, unlike in Zusak’s book, death is all-knowing, offering dark hints as to the fate of a character whose identity we don’t learn until the end.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag notwithstanding, depictions of thirty-something angst are few and far between on our stages. Jacobs-Jenkins has a terrific ear for what can only be described as millennial snark, and a fine attunement to the particularities of this generation: highly educated and politically liberal, yet disenchanted and disenfranchised, for the most part locked out of the opportunities afforded their boomer parents. Jacobs-Jenkins’s characters banter, bicker, and roughhouse – and, of course, flirt – all quite entertainingly, but there is an undercurrent of dread and hopelessness.

Less successful is the play’s unwieldy structure – it runs to an overlong two hours, with a twenty-minute interval – and lack of narrative cohesion. It is never clear why Jacobs-Jenkins chose the reunion as the vehicle for an exploration of mortality, and the play’s pay-off feels underwhelming as a result. While the play reaches for, and occasionally achieves, moments of genuine pathos, the second half becomes shouty and overwrought, and fails to convincingly advance any kind of dramatic thesis. I am not sure what it says that the character that most resembles the playwright, Emilio, emerges as belligerent, unlikeable, and, finally, exhausting.     

Still, this production, dynamically directed by Gary Abrahams and featuring a fine, exuberant ensemble, proves flattering. Ella Butler’s set makes impressive use of the tiny Red Stitch stage, its faded weatherboard porch and bare, encroaching branches fitting symbols of decay. Joe Paradise Lui’s lighting and sound designs are slickly complementary, the latter incorporating both nostalgic pop hits (think Salt-N-Pepa’s Shoop rather than Creedence Clearwater Revival) and the avant-garde in the form of the high-frequency ‘mosquito tones’ which form part of Emilio’s sound art practice, and which provide a chilling emblem of the gradual loss of our senses during the play’s denouement. The rest, as another playwright once put it, is silence.

The Comeuppance (Red Stitch) continues until 25 May 2025. Performance attended: April 30.