In Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre’s production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkin’s 2023 Off-Broadway hit The Comeuppance, nostalgia is not just a double-edged sword; it’s a guillotine.
We’re pregaming for the twentieth reunion of the class of 2002 on a porch somewhere in Washington D.C. The stage is set for a bumpy trip down memory lane: red solo cups full of ‘Jungle Juice’, photos of ungrateful step-kids; a group of friends with years of pent-up resentment and unacknowledged crushes between them. What begins as a commemoration of the past, ends with six mates mourning who they used to be.
Though a hard playwright to pin down stylistically, Jacobs-Jenkins’ catalogue is full of darkly humorous reunion-dramas like this. A reunion is the perfect premise for a playwright obsessed with identity and time’s capacity to remind us just how fickle it is.
A white family returns to their father’s mansion haunted by its plantation history in his Tony-winning 2024 play, Appropriate. A black family has a homecoming derailed by their storied lineage in his now Tony-nominated play, Purpose.
With The Comeuppance, he’s looking at the scars time has scored into the ageing millennial. Emilio (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor) is our lead in a group connected by this generation’s defining tragedies: 9/11, the pandemic, Columbine, Trump.
They call themselves ‘M.E.R.G.E’ (short for ‘Multi-Ethnic Reject Group Experience’). Emilio is a self-hating sound installation artist (naturally), and the only one of the group to have successfully left D.C. for Berlin (naturally). He hasn’t been back in thirteen years. Ursula (Aya) is his counterpoint: a warm-hearted shut-in who recently lost their grandmother and also one eye.
Then there’s Caitlin (Julia Grace), an unhappily married and increasingly unsatisfied mother-of-two; Kristina (Tess Masters), the strung-out anaesthesiologist, self-described ‘good Catholic’, and veteran; and Simon (Douglas Lyons), who’s going to be too late to make the reunion at all (or so he tells us via FaceTime).
For most of Act One this motley crew are mining their shared pasts for whatever half-remembered relationship, ‘butthole’ phobia or disappointing handjob they can haunt each other with.
In between life updates, Jacobs-Jenkins cuts through the show’s naturalistic dialogue with a macabre twist in the form of the Reaper: an impish troublemaker who takes turns possessing each cast member to rant about our relationship to mortality and tell us how each of them knows him. It’s revealed that one of them will end the show knowing Death more intimately. This trip down memory lane is a funeral march.
It’s deliciously bleak, though Jacobs-Jenkins’ script balances drama and comedy well enough to ensure things never become too nihilistic. Director Gary Abrahams wisely leans into the script’s natural humour for the same reason. Death wanders into the audience with a hand-held mic, lit by a tight spotlight that makes each mortal treatise or rant look like a stand up gig at the Comedy Republic.
The cast similarly revel in every comedic opportunity they’re given. Masters’ tragi-comic theatrics and spitfire timing make her the beating heart of the second act. While Grace’s Real Housewives-esq poise and subtle wit bring out every one of Claire’s sharp barbs in Act One without ever becoming too hammy.
Meanwhile, Ay adds a much-needed quietude with their down-to-earth delivery style, pulling the show back from the brink of melodrama with restraint and believability. Impeccable accent work (Dialect Coach, Matt Furlani) – including meta-theatrically switching into their natural Aussie accents when they’re playing Death – elevates each of their performances.
Whether blocking mimed ‘murders’ or mid-show dance numbers to naughties hits, Abrahams deploys the kind of creative playfulness that has helped him juggle the comedic and the macabre so well in the past – whether in the mythical Gothicism of Malthouse Theatre’s Yentl or the dry wit and tragedy of Red Stitch’s Iphigenia in Splott. Yet he doesn’t quite nail the balance here.
Things quickly dissolve into chaos when Francisco (the eye-catchingly erratic, Kevin Hofbauer), a veteran of the Iraq War struggling with PTSD, arrives. Emilio responds to his arrival with a stream of jabs, outbursts and scream-heavy monologues. His unrelenting self pity and thinly-veiled insecurities throughout the show make him a bit of an asshole, and also the hardest role to pull off.
With his wide-grin and earnestness, Jones-Shukoor almost redeems him. But he has a tendency to exaggerate Emilio’s already exaggerated emotions, unhelpfully burying the relatable vulnerabilities that provoke his anger behind thin melodrama.
Act Two lags as it starts to focus more on Emilio. Its sluggish momentum is unhelped by the choice to add an intermission into the show (the Off-Broadway production ran straight through), as well as unchanging lighting and sound design.
The voice modulation used for Death is inconsistent, while the repetition of the same tight spotlight to signal Death’s arrival quickly grows stale. An underused lighting rig behind the back window paired with muted sound design highlights the repetitiveness of Act Two’s back-to-back, heavy-handed monologues. Soon enough and the macabre starts to teeter too close to the soapy.
Set Design is a standout. Designer, Ella Butler replicates the weather-worn porch of Ursula’s grandmother’s house in tight confines with an eye-catching attention to detail. This simple suburban home with its peeling paint, rickety steps, and skewiff wood panels wears the effects of time on its sleeve while the people it hosts hide them.
Other macabre flourishes – dead leaf litter that gives each actor’s steps a delicious jump-scare crunch and the skeletal branches of dead trees frame the stage like the Reaper’s fingers – are perfectly gothic.
But the show ends rather limply all the same. It might be because its conclusion leans so heavily on an American purview. Jacobs-Jenkins is not just looking at the flagship events that have defined millennials, but of the American national myth: the Iraq War and its veterans, Trump and his supporters; Columbine, 9/11 and its legacies.
In its Off-Broadway run, the show included a U.S. flag on stage. This isn’t a problem on its own, of course. But the script already struggles to balance these character’s detailed personal crises and the more generalised experience of the prototypical North-American millennial. The former allows us to read universal themes – of identity crises, mortality, memory – in specific subjective experiences; the latter ultimately force feeds us those themes.
It’s why the show’s final scene works so well. Gone are the insistent appeals to the trauma of the pandemic, or to lost national myths. In their wake we are offered a quiet moment of connection between two high school friends sitting on the porch where they took their Prom photos. They’ve shed nostalgia. They connect here despite their shared memories as much as because of them; despite a haunting past and a mortal future, as much as because of them.
Jacobs-Jenkins refuses to give death the final word in the end. The grave is just one thing that unites us. The other is love. And Jungle Juice.
The Comeuppance
Red Stitch Theatre, Rear 2 Chapel Street, St Kilda East
Performance: Wednesday 30 April 2025
Season continues to 25 May 2025
Information and Bookings: www.redstitch.net
Images: Julia Grace, Tess Masters, AYA, Khisraw Jones-Shukoor and Kevin Hofbauer in The Comeuppance – photo by Cameron Grant, Parenthesy | AYA, Julia Grace, Kevin Hofbauer, Khisraw Jones-Shukoor and Tess Masters in The Comeuppance – photo by Cameron Grant, Parenthesy
Review: Guy Webster