Review: Pondering matters of life and death in Zoetic Stage's ‘The Comeuppance'

Miami Herald

15-05-2025

Zoetic Stage's 'The Comeuppance' is a satisfying punctuation mark as the theater season winds down; an exclamation point to keep theater lovers satiated through the leaner times of summer.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama (For his play 'Purpose'), created a challenging, almost surreal dramedy with layers upon layers of emotions in the present dredged up from the past.
The setting is a porch in Prince George's County, Maryland ('in fall in the year of our Lord 2022,' Jacobs-Jenkins wrote in the play notes). Twenty years after graduation from St. Anthony's High School, a Catholic academy in Washington, DC, a group of friends are gathering to pregame before their high school reunion. This particular group had named itself the 'Multi-Ethnic Reject Group' (MERGE for short).
It's Ursula's grandmother's house, but grandma has passed away and Ursula (Joline Mujica) is living there alone. She enters with a patch on her eye, carrying a pitcher of her watermelon-muddled 'jungle juice.' But, she isn't the first character we meet. That would be Death in his first incarnation, inhabiting the body of Emilio (Jovon Jacobs). The Grim Reaper appears throughout the play, merging with the bodies of each of the characters. Every cast member gets a Death monologue, just one of the many acting acrobatics that the playwright has devised to ensure that the play, heavy on dialogue, is constantly in motion.
Director Stuart Meltzer embraces Jacobs-Jenkins' fly-on-the-wall sensibility. We can relate to Death's comments, 'I like to watch.' There's a wonderful undercurrent that's meant to make us feel like silent party crashers, eavesdropping on this group who are trying to make sense of fraught personal lives and revisit what they thought would be a fun reunion. But reliving the past is much akin to Thomas Wolfe's 'Look Homeward, Angel,' and the phrase 'You can't go home again.'
There are more than a few comparisons to the 1983 comedy-drama 'The Big Chill.' Old college friends have been brought together for a funeral. The Vietnam War and its effects hover over the group. They find out that inevitable changes in their lives have made it impossible to connect as they once did.
The same happens here, just in a different era. The millennials have gone through the horrors of Columbine and 9/11. Now, as adults, they are gathering shortly after COVID. 'How was your COVID?' is the phrase in this post-pandemic gathering. A classmate, Simon, who has cancelled on the group, calls in every once in a while. And although he isn't seen, he speaks for all when he says: 'Look at all the shit we've been through – It's like too much, Columbine, 9/11, the war, the war, the endless war, then Trump, then COVID, whatever the f— is going on in the Supreme Court… Roe v. Wade….'
Emilio is an artist now living in Germany. He's in for the reunion but off to Manhattan, where his work will be shown in a biennial, presumably the Whitney. He's done well for himself, able to afford the luxuries of staying in a high-end hotel while in town.
Caitlin (Mallory Newbrough) has married an ex-cop, a man older than her, who participated in January 6 at the Capitol. 'Michael was not in the group that actually stormed the Capitol,' she makes sure her classmates hear loud and clear.
Kristina (Amy Lee Gonzalez) is an overworked anesthesiologist with five kids and a drinking problem, a carryover from so much time at the hospital during COVID. She dated Emilio in high school.
She's brought along her cousin Francisco, aka Paco (Rayner Gabriel), who is an unwelcome guest because he wasn't part of MERGE. He's a military veteran suffering from PTSD after two tours of duty in Iraq; he has a past with Caitlin.
The dowdy and shy Ursula is diabetic and has lost her eyesight in one eye. An orphan whose grandmother raised her, she's now alone and has a woman who stops by a few times a week to check in on her.
This is a brilliant all-local Equity ensemble, Mujica's tenderly sweet Ursula, Newbrough's carefully calibrated yet lonely Caitlin, Gonzalez's 'I've had it' doc mom, and Gabriel's amped up Francisco, with each actor working off of one another with obvious guidance from Meltzer. This is how the complex characters Jacobs-Jenkins created develop throughout the two-hour and 10-minute show without an intermission (a difficult but wise choice since an interval would interrupt the necessary continuous momentum and worth every minute)
When they must step out of their realistic portrayals to become Death, it is done with seamless precision so as not to seem out of character. It's a difficult tightrope and one that each of the actors maneuvers with finesse. It's not easy, mind you.
Jacobs, who has appeared in productions throughout South Florida, makes his Zoetic Stage debut here and has the weightiest role. His Emilio is the protagonist and, although all the characters are given a shot at Death, Jacobs as Emilio is the most unsettling. He begins the play as Death and winds it up at the end. It is his Death that makes you wonder whose soul he has come to collect. The steeped in reality Emilio (in some aspects based on the playwright himself) is also the character who seems the least to have crossed over to adulthood. These two spectrums call for an actor with range and Jacobs aces it.
The lighting design by Leonardo Urbina creates the atmosphere of the outdoors at dusk. During the tricky Death monologues, Urbina subtly shines a spotlight on the actor, while the others, frozen in place, are dimly lit, still able to be seen. Sound design by Haydn Diaz adds an eerie reverb to each actor's voice for Death. Then there's the realistic sounds of a neighborhood, dogs barking and birds chirping, a car driving up and a door slamming, a limousine speeding off.
Costume design by Lorena Lopez fits each character's persona – the oversized sweater and long skirt for Ursula, Emilio's richly looking beige turtleneck, brown pants, leather boots, Caitlin's breezy dress, Paco's oversized suit, and a skirt uniform for military doc Kristina.
Scenic design by Michael McCLain is a back porch filled with odds and ends shoved in a back corner, things that should have gone to the trash, but never did. At stage right are overstuffed garbage cans. There's plenty of places for the characters to move about in addition to the porch: a lawn, a picnic table. A non-realistic faux stump, which is used as a playing area seems out of place, however, affecting the realism.
While some may find the 130-minute running time daunting at the outset, once the clock begins to tick, the play and this production, like life and death, have you in its grips, and it isn't about to let you go.
If you go:
WHAT: Zoetic Stage's 'The Comeuppance' by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
WHEN: 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Friday and Saturday; 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Through Sunday, May 25.
COST: $66-$72
WHERE: Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami
INFORMATION: [phone], zoeticstage.org or arshtcenter.org
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