Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance, in its Canadian premiere at Soulpepper’s Michael Young Theatre, is a reunion comedy with a memento mori: time keeps marching towards an ending. Its five Millennial protagonists are barely middle-aged, yet Death isn’t a future guest to tidy for. It’s a roommate — quietly rearranging the furniture, eating their food, and talking about them behind their backs.
The award-winning Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate, An Octoroon, Everybody, Purpose) has made a career of interrogating theatrical form and cultural memory: appropriating genres, complicating archetypes, and insisting that audiences feel the friction. The Comeuppance continues that project: it’s a fascinating, frequently funny, creepily earworm-y theatrical experience that stages how the past and future corrode and clarify in equal measure.
The premise is deceptively simple: on the night of their 20-year high school reunion, members of a friend circle who called themselves MERG (“Multi-ethnic Reject Group) gather for pre-partying on their old stomping ground: Ursula’s front porch. The reunion itself happens off-stage. What we witness is the threshold: old friends slipping into comfortable positions and patterns, conversing and consuming, testing their shared histories, and measuring who they were against who they’ve become.
The facts are frequently in dispute. Did they really know each other back in the day? Whose memory is accurate, or selective, or flat-out false? Does it even matter? Without spoiling the plot, it’s enough to say that since high school ended, they have scattered down the separate, dispiriting corridors of their adult lives. Tonight, they laugh, they drink, and they argue in an attempt to recover and reconstruct — or to reject and repeal — their way back to the center(s) of their maze.
One of the play’s most provocative moves is how it situates private memory amid public trauma. The Columbine shooting and 9/11 flicker as formative background, and the pandemic looms like a firebreak that demarcates a before-and-after, a moment when many of these characters learned, or became, something different.
The ensemble is sharp across the board. As Emilio, Mazin Elsadig gives an intense, beautifully conflicted turn as an artist intent on recognizing and reckoning with the unspoken or elided “truths” of the past. Ghazal Azarbad’s host Ursula is more pragmatic and protective of the peace: she will acknowledge or allow truth, but she won’t be consumed by it. Nor, she insists, she will attend the reunion. Nicole Power’s Caitlin, unhappily married with stepchildren, channels the impulse to evade and elide, like water under the bridge … yet leaves a wake that complicates her stance. And Carlos Gonzalez-Vio’s mercurial army veteran Francisco is tightly wound and deeply wounded — both physically and psychically. Finally, Bahia Watson goes right over-the-top cartoony as loud, unhappy, frustrated (and possibly alcoholic) doctor Kristina. The choice generates both real laughs and real discomfort, but for me, it blurs the humanity the play otherwise savors.
Frank Cox-O’Connell’s direction is finely calibrated. There is an organic quality to the way the MERG group members move into and out of the house, settling into familiar banter and postures, and then recognizing disruptions and complications with a glance, a pause, a drink, a callback to simpler times. Shannon Lea Doyle’s naturalistic housefront set—Ursula’s porch rendered with tactile concreteness—becomes a moral architecture: a transitional space where going inside or stepping down to the street feels fraught. Jason Hand’s lighting and Olivia Wheeler’s sound are precise and evocative, and the stellar makeup work subtly marks thresholds of revelation and visitation.
Together, the design team realizes the play’s central conceit: Death is right here with these characters as they sit poised between their pasts and futures — and right here with us, as we watch the show and reflect on our own pasts from the shared porch of the auditorium. The look back brings silliness and laughter as well as conflict. But that deathly presence makes the look forward colder, grimmer, and more pressing.
“Hide too much and the hiding becomes you,” the play warns, and across that porch, we watch evasions calcify into character. In this light, The Comeuppance suggests that the only thing you’ve really got is the present moment — something many embraced during the pandemic’s great pause, when “you were the best version of yourself”. Your comeuppance isn’t made by what you did or might do: it’s shaped by what you choose right now … then choose in the next right now … then the next.
Like theatre itself, that present is evanescent and subject to revision — until it isn’t. So the question The Comeuppance poses is not when Death is coming or what to do about it: it’s whether you’ll stop hiding long enough to be someone worth meeting.
The Comeuppance runs at Soulpepper’s Michael Young Theatre through November 23, 2025. Tickets are available at soulpepper.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
