Learning that “The Comeuppance” is a 2 hour and 20 minute performance startled us. “What would interest us to sit that long,” my friend Kym Chandler said. Plus, the show had no intermission. The lady that sat next to us shared the same concerns, “I took only one sip of this water,” she laughed at the prospects of needing to use the restroom during the show.

"The Comeuppance" is a reunion story set in Prince George’s County, Maryland. High school friends Emilio, Ursula, Kristina, and Katelyn, plus Francisco meet on Ursula’s (Alana Raquel Bowers) porch before heading to their 20-year reunion. The four and a few who could not make it, plus Francisco, called themselves the Multi-Ethnic Reject Group (MERG), so race becomes the only hot-button topic off the table.

Qualms that this was going be a long 2 hour and 20 minutes with only four props on stage (white rocking chair, white side table, red ashtray, and green plant in a white pot), quickly submerged as Katelyn (Sarah Gliko (she/her)) delivered her first dramatic confession.

Somehow MacArthur Genius Award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins made contemporary discussions about January 6, COVID, Columbine, death, sexual-orientation, mental illness, homelessness, September 11, and veterans’ affairs, reflective and absolutely hilarious.

When they reminisce about Columbine, they speak of their post-Columbine concerns of fellow students. Francisco (Jaime Maseda (he/him)) found those fears justified blurting, “they were all in the Rifle Club.”   

Surprise hits the group when Emilio (Jordan Bellow) shares the he has a child with his “partner,” and the partner is a woman. It is then, 20-years later, that he learns that his best friends assumed he was gay. As he wonders why they thought he was same-gender-loving, their exchanges remain testy and his sexuality in question.   

Kristina then blurts, “Emilio is mad because we thought he was gay, but he was not,” and we learn that as his former girlfriend Kristina (Taysha Marie Canales (she/her) was the source of the rumor and the discovery become amazingly humorous about expectations placed on males and teenage sexual encounters.

Adding to the long but magical script, Bellow’s voice was an indelible piece of his performance as it was for the late James Earl Jones. The lighting by designer Minjo Kim (she/her) quickly became a creative substitute for the lack of props. The great costuming by Kitt Crescenzo (she/her) only became apparent when the actors appeared at the opening night reception and they appeared totally out of character, especially Bowers (as Ursula) who no longer looked depressed and in need.

“Is this what life is?” Kristina said during her mid-life crises exposé. She could have repeated that thought as the capstone during the drawn out ending. We made it to the shows end with no problem with Chandler adding, “I cannot see how they could have put in an intermission without keeping up the momentum.”

---

Note: All of Woolly Mammoth’s plays are beyond the expected. The theater itself sets an inclusive term with All Gender Restrooms and this Land Acknowledgment: Woolly Mammoth stands upon occupied,unceded territory: the ancestral homeland of the Nacotchtank whose descendants belong to the Piscataway peoples.

Furthermore, the foundation of this city, and most of the original buildings in Washington, DC, were funded by the sale of enslaved people of African descent and built by their hands.