Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on The Comeuppance: ‘Why write subtly – who cares? Give me something to talk about'
A decade ago, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins wrote a play about a high school reunion only to put it in a drawer, frustrated that he just couldn’t make it work.
Fast forward to shortly after lockdown, he was at reunion event for his own high school and learned that a once close friend had died and he was shocked he hadn’t found out before.
It pushed him to return to the drawer. “All plays are pulling material from your life,” he says, “but that one immediately came to mind because I thought, ‘Oh, OK. One of us is dead now.’”
At the same time, the acclaimed, prize-winning American playwright found out that a tenth of his class had died. “That is kind of an outrageous number because none of us are 40 yet. A couple from Covid, some suicides, some strange illnesses.”
And so he wrote The Comeuppance, which opens tonight at the Almeida Theatre. It feels at once a deeply personal take on friendships, mortality and the pernicious nature of memory, as well as a state-of-the nation play that takes in issues from politics to collapsing healthcare. Most of all it seeks to grapple with Covid.
“I thought what I really want to see is a play that talks to me about where I am right now, I wanted
