Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance is playing at Soulpepper in a production directed by Frank Cox-O’Connell.  It’s an enormously ambitious play.  It takes the relatively banal setting of a pre-party for a high school 20th reunion and uses it to explore a wide range of issues concerning memory, personal growth (or not), what we keep and what we leave behind and, ultimately, our relationship with Death.

It’s cleverly written, often very funny in a dark way, and the staging, sound and lighting are sometimes spectacular; especially the way lighting is used to indicate characters “possessed” by Death; who acts as a kind of gossipy chorus.  It ought to have been mind blowing but somehow it wasn’t.

When it works, it works really well.  We have three characters who have lived in the same DC suburb since high school and are very much in touch.  There’s a peer who only shows up by phone and then there are the two disruptors; a badly wounded and mentally damaged Iraq veteran a year or two older than the others and the artist who has been living in Berlin for thirteen years.  Neither of them are party to the implicit agreements on what part of the past must be forgotten and when those things are brought up mayhem ensues.

There’s some good acting.  Mazin Elsadig is intriguing as the somewhat mysterious artist who won’t discuss his own work but keeps on dredging up incidents from high school.  Nicole Power is convincing as the high school academic star who tries to escape sexual abuse by marrying a much older cop.  There’s a very physical performance from Carlos Gonzalez-Vio as the somewhat unsavoury and epileptic ex-marine Francisco and Ghazal Azarbad is the quietly sensible one who, despite/because of, her diabetes and partial blindness tends to defuse situations.  The performance that puzzled me most was Bahia Watson as the military doctor Kristina.  Apart from the basic implausibility of a hospital anesthesiologist who is blind drunk whenever she gets time off, she seemed to be overacting on first appearance; too loud, too physical, too obnoxious, too self-centred, but clearly that’s what the director wanted. She’s too good an actor for it not to be.  The various incidents and the interactions between the characters are often sharp and, let me repeat, very funny.

So where is the problem?  I think it’s that the play comes off as a series of more or less discrete scenes, which work fine individually, but when one probes the connections between them one starts to see contradictions and then taking them altogether there’s a catalogue of life experiences that’s rather implausible for a fairly normal, small group of middle class people in an American suburb.

That, of course, is my take and there’s enough good writing and acting to make for a better theatrical experience than many I’ve experienced.  There’s just this nagging doubt that it gets close to excellence but doesn’t quite make it.

The Comeuppance runs at Soulpepper until November 23rd.

Photo credits: Dahlia atz