“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.
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin June 19, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin June 19, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.