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.
Samuel D. Hunter’s play The Case for the Existence of God, in a production directed by Ted Dykstra, opened at Coal Mine Theatre on Thursday night. It’s a story about the somewhat unlikely friendship between two would be single fathers in a small town in Idaho. It’s mostly pretty sad but with some really funny moments. We can come back to the God thing.
Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks, which is currently running at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre has garnered impressive accolades since its 2001 New York debut. It’s won a Pulitzer and been named, in 2018, as “the greatest American play of the last 25 years” by the New York Times. It’s well written, dramatically well crafted and often very funny but, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t deeply engaged by it.
operaramblings 