DANCE OF DEATH

“The Comeuppance,” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

“The Comeuppance,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s unsettlingly up-to-the-moment new play (at Signature Theatre’s Pershing Square Signature Center), begins with the shadow-swathed figure of a young man on an unremarkable porch. An American flag hangs in a perfunctory way from the side of the house, picking up no air. In the course of the play, the flag comes to seem less like a patriotic statement than like a gesture meant to ward off neighborly suspicion, aimed at fitting in without a fuss. When the man begins to speak, it’s not as a human being but as humanity’s great and usually unspeaking enemy: Death.

“Hello there,” he says with an almost sheepish charisma. “You and I, we have met before, though you may not recognize me. People have a tendency to meet me once and try hard to forget it ever happened, though that never works, not for very long.”

That mismatch, between meek suburban setting and high-flown transcendent stakes, is the substance of Jacobs Jenkins’s two-stranded rope of a play. On the one hand, “The Comeuppance” is a mostly realistic portrayal of four high-school friends—some closer than others—who have gathered to “pregame” their twenty-year high-school reunion. Like the rest of us, they’ve all recently been through a stubbornly nonfictional period of plague and isolation; grown too familiar with Zoom and other facilitators of falsely intimate distance; and come out on the other side covertly but undeniably deranged.

A limo’s on its way to pick them up and take them to the party, a slightly kooky and more than a little corny sendup of the semi-marital rituals that surround the senior prom.