A decade ago, Branden 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 to talk about what everyone had gone through. We haven’t had closure on what was a multi-year trauma for the world. I felt like I wanted to describe the world as it felt.”
When we meet, the 39-year-old – described by the New York Times as “one of [America’s] most original and illuminating writers” – is remarkably chipper, given his flight from New York had landed just a few hours before. Sporting a knit jumper and khaki trousers, a beanie hat on his head, he is relaxed and quick to laugh as we chat in a dressing room deep in the bowels of the Almeida, even when the conversation veers into the morbid.
He tells me that during Covid he found himself reconnecting with people he hadn’t seen in years and was constantly surprised “at the shape of their lives when stacked against the version of them I knew” – the urge to reconnect for many in that time, he adds, was partly a “memento mori thing” about a heightened awareness of their mortality.
Death is an actual character in the play. Into a drama of old friends picking at nostalgia and long-buried grievances, every now and then Death appears to remind the audience of its presence.
“It has to do with a feeling of coming out of the pandemic where everyone was really death haunted, but no one was talking about it. Everyone was living closely to it, thinking about it and reading about it,” he says.
“It wasn’t just the virus, but we were watching videos of black men being murdered, George Floyd being among them. It felt like a very death-haunted time, but I can count the conversations I had about it on one hand. There’s a human urge to pretend it doesn’t exist but it’s always in the room.”
Approaching his 40s, Jacobs-Jenkins started to notice friends coming down with ailments and going on different medications. In an extreme case one friend – who inspires a character in the play – lost her sight due to diabetes she didn’t know she had. “She was just at dinner and suddenly she couldn’t see.”
“This is the age where you start to be the person who has whatever issue,” he continues. “You’re so aware of how much your body is changing.”
He also talks about how being a father to a young daughter has changed his outlook. “You become very aware of how fragile you are and how time moves. People say the days are long but the years are short. It’s kind of true. I can’t believe I have a three-year-old.”
The Comeuppance of the title is, according to one character, “The age of bad choices seeking their consequences.” Another calls it, “The age of shit showing up.” Part of that refers to geo-political, social issues another part is personal. “Also the Comeuppance is the idea that if you drink a lot in your 20s you’re feeling it now,” he laughs heartily.
Jacobs-Jenkins grew up in Washington – “It’s a really odd city to be from because it’s a company town, and that company is politics” – though he now lives with husband Cheo Bourne and their daughter in Brooklyn.
The play references politics in Trump via an offstage character who had stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In real life, the writer wasn’t there when it happened. “DC is crazy. It’s whatever the president is, that’s the vibe of the place. January 6 was wild, it’s still wild,” he says.
He believes it’s a playwrights job to document not just the facts but the experience of living through the moment to ensure some collective memory. The play is about memories too, what happens when they conflict or are lost.
He’s dealing with that directly as during the pandemic his mother suffered memory loss from several strokes. “She doesn’t remember my sister’s wedding. It’s a weird feeling – our sense of self comes from our access to these memories. Your relationships to people are based on your assumptions about memories you share, but what if you don’t share them?”
The play also brilliantly captures that nostalgia of looking back, of the possibilities that once existed that are fast fading. The play references that there’s a German word (of course there’s a German word) for this: torschlusspanik, which translates as ‘door closing panic’.
“I love shows like The Great British Bake-Off or The Great Pottery Throw Down,” he says smiling. “There was a time in my life when I watched those shows and was like, ‘I can do that.’ And I remember I crossed the threshold where I thought ‘I’m too old. There’s not enough time for me to get as good as I need to be to do that. That’s how I think of torschlusspanik. You step into a certain part of your life and you’re like, ‘I don’t think I can do this.’”
I love London, the theatre culture here – I wish we had something closer to it in the States
Growing up, Jacobs-Jenkins grew up around theatre and participated in arts activities. He spent half his year with his grandmother in Arkansas and she used to write amateur plays based on bible stories. “That may have planted some seed in me. She’d take me to weird outdoor passion plays. That was my first taste of a theatrical event. At night, I’d go to sleep and hear her typewriter going.”
He went on to study anthropology at Princeton – presumably good for a job that mines the human condition, and “I resented the idea I’d have to study English Literature to be a playwright”.
When I ask at what stage he actually wanted to be a professional playwright, he laughs, “Only recently. I ran from it in a way for so long. I didn’t really believe that it was going to be a real thing in my life until I was approaching 30. Everything until then was so tentative.” Before then he had worked at the New Yorker magazine and had plans to go to law school.
It was An Octoroon, a searing treatise on racial stereotypes and tropes written in 2014 that really got him noticed. After it ran in London in 2017, first at the Orange Tree then the National he won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright. “Yes, from the Evening Standard, it was insane! Also from the critics here.” He laughs. “no one was saying I was the most promising playwright in the States.”
He is being a bit self-deprecating – he had already awards in the US for An Octoroon and Appropriate, (also written in 2014 and which came to the Donmar in 2019), another acclaimed play that explored race relations in America. It was after those two plays that a teacher at Juilliard – where he was on the playwriting course – told him, “You need to acknowledge you’re a playwright. Write your plays and shut up”.
Jacobs-Jenkins’ work has been embraced in London, playing at prestigious venues such as Hampstead Theatre, the Donmar, the National and now the Almeida. “I’m blown away as much as anybody. I love London, the theatre culture here – I wish we had something closer to it in the States. I just feel so lucky to have had the career I’ve had here.”
In America he’s also reached the next level, getting a play on in Broadway. How does that feel? “It feels chaotic because it is a play I wrote 15 years ago.” He laughs. “It feels great in some ways as,” he pauses and laughs gain “as a middle finger at certain people. My whole career people have said, ‘Your plays are too weird, your plays will never make money, you’re not a commercial writer’… and then you open the show on Broadway and you break the house record for most sales. It’s so satisfying to get that validation because it makes you feel like your self-esteem was not delusional.”
When asking about the difference between his staging plays in Britain and America, he says in the US there is a culture of canonising and reviving work by black writers including August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry that goes back almost a century.
“There’s a really invested black theatre audience who feel safe in the theatre… So fewer people are scared about seeing black people on stage. Here there has been historically these waves of black writers who fall into oblivion.”
We talk about ‘Black Out nights’, performances aimed at bringing non-white audiences into the theatre. In the UK it was drawn into the culture wars (though interestingly it hasn’t been in the US) with even Prime Minister Rishi Sunak criticising the practice for being exclusionary (it’s not). “It’s just a misreading of what those nights are. In America we have a strong black audience that buses in to see the Colour Purple or whatever… it’s an audience that’s a privilege to have so a black out night is not that uncommon of an idea.”
Would he consider such nights at his shows? “I’m not averse to it… my plays tend to draw diverse audiences and I like to feel people be in the space together and listen to them laugh or not. But if people thought it was helpful then sure. It’s all a marketing scheme. It’s all about selling tickets, so sure.”
Eminent British critic Michael Billington once hailed Jacobs-Jenkins for pushing his plays to the limit. Is that true? “The only advice I live under is from Tennessee Williams, who says, ‘The only advice I give is to not bore people.’ That’s the baseline. Then build on top of that. Then the limits are fun to explore. I believe theatre is a space where we have to learn how deeply we feel.”
His day job is still teaching theatre and performance studies at Yale (and he does some TV too – “I don’t expect to get rich of playwriting”). He says, “I have students who sometimes come to me and they want to write about things subtly and I’m like, ‘Why write subtly, who cares? Subtle? Who cares? Why have I paid $30 to see you be subtle?
“Give me something I can go home with and talk to my friends about. The best compliment to me is when someone says, ‘I went out with my friends after and we talked all night,’ or the next day they were still thinking about my play. OK, mission accomplished. You gave me that ticket price, you can think for an extra day, that’s the best version of the exchange.”
But audiences are fickle, one teacher told him adding that even the most revered playwrights suffered terrible periods. “Edward Albee [who wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?] had three strong wins in his career, but people forget that in the in-between space nobody gave a crap about him.
“When Tennessee Williams died nobody gave a crap about him. Arthur Miller’s best work was done in the first 20 years of his career then he had four decades more and it was terrible. I’m always trying to be open eyed about this. I also have to acknowledge that I have three shows running at great theatres which is ridiculous.”
As we wrap up I ask for a playwright with three shows currently running, numerous awards, fellowships and a theatre teaching job, what success looks like. “I feel unfortunately, I’ve internalised that adage: you’ll never make a living but you can make a killing.”
He laughs then mock considers what success in the theatre looks like, “I want people to think I’m a master, which will happen, just give me a few decades... I just want to hear someone say ‘He’s a master playwright!’” He may be joking, but more than a few people are already saying just that.
