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by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Frank Cox-O’Connell

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Distillery District, Toronto

November 6-23, 2025

Ursula: “The Age of Bad Choices Seeking Their Consequences”

American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has been popular in Southern Ontario of late. The Shaw Festival staged An Octoroon (2014) in 2017, ARC and Crow’s Theatre his Gloria (2015) in 2022, the Shaw Festival his Everybody (2017) in the same year and Coal Mine staged his Appropriate (2014) in 2023. Now Soulpepper has mounted The Comeuppance (2023), and one can’t help but feel that the play simply does not have the vitality or wild inventiveness of the previous four. Its structure is an iteration of the far-too-familiar “party-that-goes-wrong”. Its effect is rather too much like a version of the movie The Big Chill (1983), only for Millennials. Only one non-naturalistic feature makes it stand out, but even then, its meaning is less than profound.

The action takes place on a Shannon Lea Doyle’s realistic set of the humble front porch of a small house. The house belongs to thirtysomething Ursula in Maryland and is the place designated for a clique of friends to gather for a party before heading off to the high school 20th reunion of the class of 2002 . The clique of five, one of whom has cancelled because of work, belonged to a group they called M.E.R.G.E., meaning “Multi-Ethnic Reject Group” who were all the smartest students in their year. Audiences should know that Jacobs-Jenkins does not specify the ethnic background of any of the characters so that how director Frank Cox-O’Connell has cast the play is simply one possibility of many.

The gist of the play is that the five characters we meet all left high school filled with idealism and the notion that they could make a difference in the world. In 20 years since graduating, they all feel that the world and their own bad decisions have beaten them down and hope has gone. One could try to muster some sympathy for them except that their "plight" is nothing special – it is often a part of growing older and approaching middle age. For that reason the play can’t really be the “state of the Millennials” play that it tries to be since high schoolers of any given year may have experienced the same personal and global disappointments.

Near the end of detailing all his Millennials’ woes, Jacobs-Jenkins shows that he does realize the fact that his generation (he, too, being a Millennial), is not special. He has the absent Simon tell us via speakerphone: “Look at all the shit we've been through – It’s like too much, Columbine, 9/11, the war, the war, the war, then Trump, then COVID, … I want to say it’s too much for one lifetime, but then I think: What does that even mean? I look at my parents and I’m like, wait, they lived through all the same shit and then some? And don’t get me started on my grandparents. I keep asking myself: Is this what life is? How did I get it into my head that life was supposed to be something other than this?” This one key speech suggests that Jacobs-Jenkins himself believes that if Millennials could move beyond their notions of self-importance they would realize they are no more special than any other members of humankind.

Jacobs-Jenkins reinforces this idea with the omnipresence of Death itself. During the course of the action, Jacobs-Jenkins depicts Death as a being that inhabits each of the characters on stage in sequence and uses their bodies to speak directly to us. Death manifests itself first in Emilio, then in Ursula, Caitlin, Ursula again, Francisco, Kristina and finally Emilio. Each incarnation is signalled through a change in Olivia Wheeler’s sound design which alters each voice and in Jason’s Hand’s lighting which reveals through ultraviolet light a skull that has been painted on the face of each character. It’s a pity this technique is not always successful largely because of the placement of the actors and the lighting instruments.

Death’s series of monologues are a welcome respite from the painfully banal and ultimately tedious conversations of the human characters and constitutes the one non-naturalistic element of the play that distinguishes it from so many other plays about parties going wrong. Jacobs-Jenkins’ use of Death may be new but its meaning is anything but. In the Middle Ages a widespread Gregorian chant (c. 912ad) began “Media vita in morte sumus” (“In the midst of life we are in death”). In The Comeuppance, Jacobs-Jenkins suggest that his characters on the threshold of turning 40 have finally lost the feeling of youthful immortality and now must decide whether to carry on with their lives in a meaningful way or to muddle aimlessly along as they have done.

Jacobs-Jenkins, of course, had already dramatized the idea that “death comes to all” in his play Everybody, a reworking of the medieval play Everyman (c. 1510), in which Death does come for a figure representing all mankind who foolishly seeks a series of ineffective means in order to escape Death’s clutches. Because Jacobs-Jenkins has already presented this topic on such a grand, universal scale, one does wonder why he has chosen to present it again in such a petty, particularized context.

Of the five characters Jacobs-Jenkins presents on stage, only two arouse any sympathy. These are Ursula, the owner of the house where the M.E.R.G.E. group is meeting, and Emilio, the first of the clique to arrive. Of the five Ursula would seem to be the worst off. The grandmother who raised her has recently died leaving Ursula alone, and Ursula has diabetes and has already gone blind in one eye because of it. Ursula has no desire to go to the reunion and have everyone see how poorly off she is. Ursula sees clearly what has happened and pronounces the period her friends live in as “The Age of Bad Choices Seeking Their Consequences”.

Ghazal Azarbad brings out all the warmth of Ursula and reveals her as the only one of the group who has made her peace with the changes time has caused. Who knows why Jacobs-Jenkins asks Ursula to wear an eyepatch. People in her condition welcome whatever light is available from their defective eye. And, contrary to the author, a lack of depth perception does not mean a person can’t pour drinks.

Emilio, who has been living in Berlin for the past nine years, is the closest to the author’s representative within the play. He is the one who most heavily criticizes the other characters for their hypocrisy, even though his story of having a daughter back in Germany is not quite what it seems. Mazin Elsadig portrays Emilio as eloquent and perceptive though perhaps too unforgiving. Elsadig highlights the comedy of Emilio’s protesting too much when Emilio finds that his friends have always thought he was gay.

Caitlin is an unpleasant character and Nicole Power does nothing to soften the effect. Emilo wonders why Caitlin, who was the smartest girl in school, has married a right-wing ex-policeman and become a stay-at-home mother to raise two children she dislikes. The paradox is that Caitlin, who has the most conventional life of the group, is also the one who acts the most superior to them. Power captures Caitlin’s defensive disdain so well that we can hardly stand the character.

Bahia Watson plays Kristina, an anesthesiologist with a drinking problem married to a man twice her age. When Kristina first enters and is sober, Watson speaks in well-modulated tones. When Kristina is drunk, which happens surprisingly fast, Watson shifts into a piercing voice and shouts her lines. This unvarying tone does not help put across the long speech Jacobs-Jenkins gives her where she complains about her life and the drain on her energy from having five children.

To everyone’s displeasure, Kristina has brought along her cousin Francisco, known as Paco, who never belonged to MERGE and is actively dislike by the M.E.R.G.E. members, except Kristina, for his boorish behaviour. Kristina pleads for sympathy for Paco, well played by Carlos Gonzalez-Vio, because after five tours of duty in Afghanistan he has returned with attacks of PTSD, of which Gonzalez-Vio gives us a frightening example. Gonzalez-Vio gives Paco the practiced smoothness of a con man but also makes us realize that he generates this manner of speech to conceal his internal instability. Besides a PTSD attack, Paco also has a seizure which requires all of Gonzalez-Vio’s strength as a physical performer to portray. As a medical note, don’t merely stand by as the doctor Kristina does during the seizure but turn the affected person on their side, if possible, so they don’t choke their tongue or on their own vomit. This is in Jacobs-Jenkins’ text but Cox-O’Connell omits to present it.

With an intermissionless 2-hour, 10-minute running time, The Comeuppance outstays its welcome shortly after all the characters arrive and the backbiting and revelation of tawdry secrets typical of “the party that goes wrong” begin. One could praise how well Jacobs-Jenkins captures the way that Millennials speak, but, in fact, the author does it so well that the characters and what they say sound incredibly superficial and egocentric. Yes, they must all face Death as must everyone, but as Jacobs-Jenkins has presented it, we just don’t care.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Bahia Watson as Kristina, Mazin Elsadig as Emilio, Nicole Power as Caitlin, Ghazal Azarbad as Ursula and Carlos Gonzalez-Vio as Paco; Nicole Power as Caitlin, Bahia Watson as Kristina, Ghazal Azarbad as Ursula, Mazin Elsadig as Emilio and Carlos Gonzalez-Vio as Paco; Mazin Elsadig as Emilio and Ghazal Azarbad as Ursula. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.soulpepper.ca.