Soulpepper’s ‘The Comeuppance’ is a shallow spectacle of American navel-gazing

If you can’t already tell, this is a work that screams “America” from the rooftops. (Shannon Lea Doyle’s set literally features the American flag on the front porch of her suburban house.) 

Its Canadian premiere, however, now running at Soulpepper’s Michael Young Theatre, plays to audiences on this side of the border like pure popcorn theatre. And that’s not a good thing. 

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s wallowing melodrama centres on a group of elder millennials gathering for a high school reunion some 20 years after graduation. These largely one-dimensional characters seem like stereotypical, dysfunctional American millennials, the kind we all know so well from film and television. 

Emilio (Mazin Elsadig) is the bohemian artist who has wandered off to the big city and is finally returning to his hometown in search of some enlightenment. Kristina (Bahia Watson), a doctor, is the overworked mother with too many children who drinks her sorrows away.

Meanwhile, her cousin Francisco (Carlos Gonzalez-Vio) is a marine who’s returned from several tours of duty, haunted by his demons. And Nicole Power’s Caitlin, who used to date Francisco, is the former high achiever of the group who’s now stuck in a loveless marriage with a man far older than her. Perhaps the play’s most developed character is Emilio’s closest confidante, Ursula (Ghazal Azarbad), who lives with diabetes and recently lost her left eye. 

As with any reunion drama, tensions soon flare among these old friends — unsurprising. What is surprising, however, is the scope of issues Jacobs-Jenkins attempts to tackle: everything from social media and artificial intelligence to abortion, alcoholism, the Columbine High School shooting, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But “The Comeuppance” stalls because it favours this breadth over any substantial depth. The underlying tensions among these friends are merely manifestations of broader racial, class and political divides of America. Yet, beyond minor allusions to these larger themes, Jacobs-Jenkins almost entirely shies away from them. 

Toward the end of the play, Emilio is asked why he gave up photography to pursue the far more niche practice of soundscape art. His reply: “I got tired of realism.” After seeing “The Comeuppance,” it certainly feels that Jacobs-Jenkins shares a similar sentiment. He seems unwilling to look America in the eye. 

Throughout, his play continually slides into the supernatural. Death is personified as a character in the show, haunting the friends’ reunion. (All the actors take turns playing him.) It’s initially a compelling narrative device, though is never justified by the play’s conclusion. 

Jason Hand’s lighting and Olivia Wheeler’s sound designs help mark these leaps in tone and style. But director Frank Cox-O’Connell’s production too often comes across as satirical, with overly broad performances from much of the cast. 

It’s not unexpected for Jacobs-Jenkins to weave humour into his works. He did it marvellously in his 2013 play “Appropriate,” about a white family from the American South who must reckon with the dark legacies of their recently deceased patriarch. In that instance, humour was used not to charm, but rather to disarm the audience, further opening them up to the dark, racial themes at the centre of the play. 

Not so, however, in “The Comeuppance.” More often than not, I found myself laughing at these clichéd characters rather than with them. And I was laughing with the same Canadian smugness — an air of Canadian superiority — with which I watch the broadcast “news”/entertainment out of the U.S. 

Maybe that’s on me.

But I think that when we program American plays on Canadian stages, we should be selecting works that speak to us, too, with universal themes that transcend borders. “The Comeuppance,” however, seems so focused on checking off all the buzziest American issues of the day that it fails to step back and look at the larger themes, and humanity, that undergirds it all.