“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.
Denne historien er fra June 19, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra June 19, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
LET'S MAKE A DEAL
\"Death Becomes Her\" and \"Burnout Paradise.\"
ANTI HEROES
\"The Franchise,\" on HBO.
FELLOW-TRAVELLERS
The surprisingly sunny origins of the Frankfurt School.
NOW YOU SEE ME
John Singer Sargent's strange, slippery portraits of an art dealer's family.
PARIS FRIEND - SHUANG XUETAO
Xiaoguo had a terror of thirst, so he kept a glass of water on the table beside his hospital bed. As soon as it was empty, he asked me to refill it. I wanted to warn him that this was unhealthy - guzzling water all night long puts pressure on the kidneys, and pissing that much couldn't be good for his injury. He was tall, though, so I decided his insides could probably cope.
WILD SIDE
Is Lake Tahoe's bear boom getting out of hand?
GETTING A GRIP
Robots learn to use their hands.
WITHHOLDING SEX FROM MY WIFE
In the wake of [the] election, progressive women, who are outraged over Donald Trump's victory at the ballot box, have taken to social media with public, vengeful vows of chastity. - The Free Press.
DEADLINE EXTENSION
Old age, reborn.