Grim reaper comes calling at the college reunion
ITHINK OF humans as products of history,” says playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The description certainly suits his best-known work, An Octoroon, in which one actor simultaneously plays a 21stcentury African-American New York playwright (like BJJ) and a 19th-century slave owner (or 19th-century playwright playing a 19th-century slave owner, to be precise).
Jacobs-Jenkins’s latest does not have the invention of An Octoroon. But what play does? Instead the premise here – a reunion – is dramatically speaking as tried and tested a framework for a play as it is possible to imagine.
Five former friends get together in Washington 20 years after they graduated before heading to a college reunion. There is, however, an uninvited guest. His name is Death and he has been awfully busy recently what with the pandemic. He inhabits any living or inanimate object he chooses, in this case the five friends who have congregated at one of the group’s quaint rural house before setting off to the main event. Each get their chance to host the smiter-in-chief who in turn tells us their history. Directed by Eric Ting, whose production of the play was first seen at New York’s Signature Theatre, the evening crackles with wit and an unsettling dark comedy punctuated by the sizzle of an ultra-violet fly killer on Usrula’s (Tamara Lawrence) porch where the play is set.
Everyone in this proudly geeky group now lives the adult lives defined by their choices. The antagonist is artist Emilio (Anthony Welsh) who is exhibiting in New York but who has been living in Berlin for 13 years. He takes no prisoners in his chiding of Catlin (Yolanda Kettle) for being married to a Republican who supported the January 6 storming of the Capitol. Army veteran Paco (Ferdinand Kingsley), we learn, was your Columbine-style quiet kid in the school and doesn’t really fit in with the geeky camaraderie of the group. But Kristina (Katie Leung) who does, brought him along because it might help with his post-Fallujah PTSD.
Paco knows Death better than all of others of course. So well, in fact, he can sometimes even see the smiter-in-chief, which prompts Paco to wonder who Death has turned up for this evening.
Tension stalks the evening as we wait to learn the reason for Death’s visit. But what really grips is watching how all members of the group assert themselves as fully formed human beings only to find they are exactly as they were 20 years ago. Not a profoundly revelatory lesson, but one that’s told extremely well.