Comeuppance - Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

A hauntingly surreal play that plumbs the depths of a group of close friends reuniting for the first time in decades.

Twenty years after graduating from a Catholic academy in Washington, DC, a group of old friends gather on a porch to pregame their high school reunion. Bonded by a shared sense of alienation and by the traumatic events of their high school years, including the Columbine massacre and 9/11, as well as their own self-proclaimed “Multi-Ethnic Reject” status, the friends are nonetheless surprised to find their memories of core teenage experiences no longer match up. What they do share is a sense that their lives have been continually put on hold by one tragedy or another, up to and including the still-lingering Covid-19 pandemic. Haunting the group is the specter of Death, who serially inhabits each character throughout the play to reveal the substance beneath their chatter. As the friends’ competing versions of their teenage years lead to an increasingly charged encounter, they find themselves facing the difficult reckoning that their past actions may have irrevocably sealed their present fates.