Wooly Mammoth’s production of The Comeuppance is an experience.
The story of The Comeuppance is so much my own. Friends from the graduating class of 2002 of a PG County hugh school reunite before their 20th reunion. They talk about their youths together, Columbine, 9/11, and the pandemic. I graduated high school in 2002 in the next county over, and my experience was bookended and defined by Columbine and 9/11. Like the characters, I was part of a circle of socially awkward, artistic academics with some more popular and athletic fringe friends. Some of us went on to do amazing things, and some of us live much more domestic lives. Coming together again is an awkward dance of remembrance and learning who we’ve all grown to become. I was absolutely personally invested in the reuniting of MERG, and all their problems.
The acting in Wooly Mammoth's production is phenomenal. Over the course of those two and a half unyielding hours a cast of five become their characters and maintain a magnetic grasp of the audience. While some actors pull off the transition between their principal characters and Death a bit more successfully than others, all five cast members effectively and engagingly represent their primary roles with perfect affect. The faults of the play do not fall on their talented shoulders.
Those faults are the work of playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.
The play runs for two and a half hours without an intermission. The ushers are sure to remind audience members of this as they walk to their seats, signs warn patrons, the website states if clearly … And it shouldn’t. There’s contextual reason to deny the audience an intermission; it’s only a power-play on the part of the playwright. It’s neither meaningful nor avant-garde: it’s just control. So, strike one for a sophomoric attempt to disrupt the theater fling experience with no purpose.
Worse than this, though, is the play’s conclusion. There is an argument at the end that things were better at the height of the pandemic. That “we” were better people, more considerate neighbors, that we were more socially responsible. The final narration challenges our present actions and selves and suggests that we should return to the practices we developed from 2020-2021. And this idea is shockingly grotesque. It glosses over the deaths, the tragedies, the protests, the political unrest, the violence, the poverty, the disparity, the struggle, the starvation … to present the suburban comfort of quarantine. The communities privileged enough to maintain full pantries and open spaces for exercise and distance gatherings. Nothing was better during a pandemic that took so many lives and left so much devastation in its wake; there was a strong performance of community as we socialized entirely virtually. Things didn’t improve: anything that looked good was just acting. A playwright should understand this.
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