Theatre
Set pre-Trump 2.0, this Red Stitch production of The Comeuppance by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins inspires vertigo in its depiction of a world already greatly changed. By Robert Reid.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance is reluctant in its message
This review contains spoilers.
Red Stitch’s latest production is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance, directed by Gary Abrahams – an American slice-of-life drama suffused with a queasy sense of the unheimlich zeitgeist.
Sometimes a play is an excuse to say a thing, or a collection of mostly related things. It brings together a set of characters that represent specific viewpoints, politics or histories and – like Godzilla versus King Kong – lets them fight. The premise is often a family in a family home, as it makes sense to substitute the family unit for humanity to frame our disagreements, petty and otherwise. Classic examples include Stephen Sewell’s Hate and Hannie Rayson’s Two Brothers.
The characters air old grievances, betrayals and twisted recollections, and debate whose memories are correct and who has the right to remember. Often the debate escalates to violence because theatre demands drama, and debate itself is not inherently dramatic.
In The Comeuppance, the trope is the high-school reunion, which focuses the analysis on generational, specifically Millennial, concerns. Five friends who graduated from high school 20 years before – 2005, for those not inclined to do the maths – meet before the reunion to catch up and share a party limo to the dance. Once the high-school rejects – they called their little group MERG (with a soft g) for Multi-Ethnic Rejects Group – they’re now adults who drifted apart in the intervening years.
The five are Emilio (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor), who has become a conceptual artist in Europe, his ex-girlfriend Kristina (Tess Masters), now a returned army doctor, Ursula (AYA), who has developed diabetes and gone blind in one eye, Caitlyn (Julia Grace), who has married a MAGA insurrectionist, and Paco (Kevin Hofbauer), the returned vet struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.Ursula, one of the group who has remained in their home town, hosts the meet-up on her convincingly rendered front porch.
The text and production signal from the outset that the action will be subject to reflection. The characters will (and do) play out their traumas in too-neatly structured beats, the telltale sign of plotting that’s designed to drip-feed emotional reveals. These are stepping stones that will lead us through the true focus of the text, its commentary.
Set in the almost-now, the Covid-19 pandemic looms large in the immediate past. The January 6 Capitol riots and online conspiracy theories are all recent and the Columbine High School shootings and 9/11 are formative memories. The Second Gulf War and the war on terror have affected these young Americans in all the ways you might expect.
Their views are gradually teased out over the course of the evening and interrogated with a performative sense of balance. Each has valid arguments that are undercut by their hypocrisies or weaknesses. Given that the country described by The Comeuppance is now disappearing people off its streets, the play already feels dated, chafing at the quaint irritations of a corporate-owned democracy racing headlong towards fascist oligarchy.
This would be enough to make a decent fist of contemporary American drama. Though its actual drama feels forced, I can accept that it is there to keep our attention while the didactic element does its work under the surface of the narrative. It’s not quite August: Osage County, but they share similar territory.
However, there is an interstitial gimmick throughout that thwarts the naturalism the rest of the production is striving for. Introducing the play and returning at various intervals, “Death” acts as a kind of narrator or perhaps host, directly addressing the audience by “taking over” the bodies of the characters to make wry commentaries on contemporary American life or to fill in unnecessary exposition.
The recurring interruption of a smugly charmless Grim Reaper commentator doesn’t advance the narrative or argument: it simply feels superfluous. At best, like an annoying memento mori, it reminds us that we are seeing a moment from an empire in decline, but at two hours plus interval, the play would also benefit from just getting the hell on with it.
The performances are uniformly strong, which is what we have come to expect from Red Stitch over the past 23 years. AYA as Ursula is a shut-in who is easy to empathise with and Hofbauer as Paco has an aggressive and energetic charm that I think I would find threatening in real life. Grace as Caitlyn and Jones-Shukoor as Emilio both create complex characters, superficially pleasant but very easy to dislike, and Masters as Kristina is a hard case who falls to whining very quickly.
Abrahams’ direction is subtle and character-focused, allowing these five characters to be basic, terrible people. Ella Butler’s set is impressively realistic and lends verisimilitude to the production – it really looks like the outside of a house in an American suburb – which makes the space feel crowded and helps to build tension in place of action.
Thinking about it afterwards, it made me notice how fast things are happening in the world. It’s a play that is set unequivocally in an era pre-Trump 2.0. Though that’s only a few months ago, the world is already so fundamentally different that this play feels crazily anachronistic. It creates a kind of empathetic dissonance that I think makes the play more interesting now than it would have been this time last year, and leaves me with a disquieting sense of vertigo.
There’s much to be appreciated in The Comeuppance. The contemporary commentary is refreshing for Australian theatre, which can still reasonably be said to err on the conservative side of its politics. Despite its dissonance, the presence of Death as a kind of linking device or unreliable narrator can strike a metaphorical resonance with these scions of an empire in decline.
The whole is hamstrung by a dogged grip on naturalism. A faith in props, set and accent, while admirable in the pursuit of representation, belies a corresponding lack of faith in the audience’s imagination, just as the text seems reluctant to say what it believes, instead couching its politics in a milquetoast suburban Midwest American “niceness”.
Death’s only real action is to tell us at the end that it has come to collect Ursula, the only queer character in the play. It’s not even an event contained in the narrative, so why tell us? Why kill this character specifically, when it doesn’t change anything? Once again, I can’t help but think of playwright Fleur Kilpatrick’s call for a year’s boycott of plays on the Australian stage in which women are killed. Australian theatre – please stop killing your women and queers!
The Comeuppance is playing at Red Stitch, Melbourne, until May 25.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 10, 2025 as "Queasy zeitgeist".
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