Review: THE COMEUPPANCE at Stray Cat Theatre

Guest contributor David Appleford’s review of Stray Cat Theatre’s production of THE COMEUPPANCE:

Reunions are never really about catching up. They’re about score-keeping, unresolved crushes, unspoken wounds, and the quiet panic that the best years might be behind us. In Stray Cat Theatre’s season-opener presentation of THE COMEUPPANCE, now playing at Tempe Centre for The Arts until October 11, writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins takes the template of the classic American reunion drama and breaks it open, injecting the genre with ghostly forebodings and the lingering hangover of post-pandemic malaise. The results are bold, but often maddeningly uneven.

The setup is deceptively cozy. The play opens on a porch, a beautifully detailed, lived-in set by Eric Beeck where Ursula (Iris Huey) has gathered a few old high school friends for a “pre-reunion,” a more manageable warm-up to the full 20-year class gathering she has no intention of attending. Ursula has diabetes, wears an eye patch, and clearly carries more than physical pain.

There’s warmth in the air as Caitlin (Michelle Luz) and Emilio (normally played by Tanner J Conley but at Sunday’s matinee performance by understudy Noah Delgado) arrive.  Caitlin, cheerfully stranded without her husband for the evening, and Emilio, the expat artist back from abroad with an inscrutable air of worldliness and grievance.  It’s a night that starts in sweet reminiscence, then slides, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not, into confrontation and chaos.

At first, everything moves with gentle ease. The dialogue is unhurried, textured, full of the kind of small, revealing moments that make you want to listen closely.  Writer Jacobs-Jenkins and director Seth Tucker let the characters breathe.  For a while, it feels natural as if the characters had truly wandered in from real life.

But reunions rarely stay polite, and writer Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t seem to be interested in nostalgia for its own sake. Soon enough, the surface calm splinters. Kristina (Willa Eigo), a harried anesthesiologist desperate for one night of release, arrives with Francisco (Phillip Herrington), a loud, volatile military vet with no real standing in this once-close crew. He was never an official member of their high school outsider clique, and Emilio wastes no time reminding him of that. Their ensuing hostility sets off a chain reaction of resentments and revelations that spiral into a kind of chaotic group therapy that’s booze-fueled and often bruising.

This is where the play both deepens and starts to strain. Jacobs-Jenkins touches on an impressive range of social and political undercurrents such as American imperialism, 9/11, the Capitol insurrection, and gun violence, but these themes are embedded in character backstories rather than fully explored.

There are moments when THE COMEUPPANCE teeters into melodrama.  There are shouting matches, physical outbursts, and a liquor-fueled meltdown, all rooted in characters whose emotional lives are richly sketched. These people are contradictions: brave and petty, self-aware and deluded, brimming with regrets they wear like armor.

The cast is truly an ensemble, each actor underplaying just enough to let the tension bubble naturally. Huey is a fortress of vulnerability, Delgado brings volatility without caricature, and Luz, Eigo and Herrington each deliver performances that are both specific and searching. No one outshines the others; they move like a constellation, orbiting around their shared past and individual pain.

Seth Tucker’s direction keeps the energy nimble and the arguments snapping.  And there’s no denying the emotional force, especially toward the end. In a particularly affecting moment, two characters are left alone on stage. Their exchange shifts into a different register: quiet and unguarded, even intimate. They’re speaking softly, truthfully, in a register untouched by performance or posturing. It’s like a moment of genuine grace that transcends the structure around it.

And then there’s Death. Not as metaphor, but as character. Performers freeze in position, and so does time, as each actor eventually steps out of the narrative to deliver conversational, often ambiguous monologues to the audience suggesting they’ve been temporarily possessed by the spirit of death. The first comes from Emilio, who steps forward and names himself, among many others, Amokye, Magwayen, and Anubis: the Egyptian god of death. The others will follow.

Are we really watching death speak through the living? These spectral interludes hover on the edge of the surreal, atmospherically lit by Stacey Walston and given a ghostly resonance of dread by Pete Bish’s low-rumbling sound design, but they also risk cluttering an already complex tapestry. If Jacobs-Jenkins is reaching for a cosmic register of ancestral trauma, the burden of historical memory, and a prediction of deathly things yet to happen, it doesn’t quite land with the clarity or impact he may have intended. The result is a thematic overreach that confuses more than it clarifies.  The Gothic overtones feel like a gesture toward profundity that the rest of the play doesn’t fully support.

But even with its missteps, THE COMEUPPANCE lingers. Ultimately, this is a play about memory and mortality.  But it’s also about how we never quite grow out of who we were at 18. It doesn’t offer closure, and maybe that’s as it should be. This isn’t the reunion where everyone gets what they want. It’s the one where they get what they can handle with the sense that we carry our younger selves into every room, and sometimes, those younger versions come back to haunt us.

With a running time of two hours plus and performed on a thrust stage, Jacobs-Jenkins's uneven script may waver at times, yet to the company’s credit, and to director Seth Tucker, this Stray Cat Theatre production remains impossible to ignore.

THE COMEUPPANCE runs through October 11th at The Tempe Center for the Arts Studio Theatre -- https://www.tempecenterforthearts.com/ -- 833-ATC-SEAT -- 700 W. Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, AZ

Stray Cat Theatre -- https://straycattheatre.org/

Graphic credit to Stray Cat Theatre