(seen at the performance on 29th April 2024)
There are plays written in ink using the finest calligraphy, but the majority of playwrights these days use a ballpoint pen. Efficient, easy to read and making a mark which may not be admired forever as high art but will remain legible for years to come. Then there are those who evidently ran out of ink and resorted to a box of Crayola.
The jumbo-thick ones allow tiny hands to control them as they scribble untidily on the newsprint sheets - which the magic fridge magnets will make disappear days after holding them up.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s characters appear largely created using a single crayon which grows progressively blunter over two interminable hours.
We are in American High School Reunion territory, a group of late 30-something rejects of the time – M.E.R.G. they call themselves (Multi-ethnic reject group) – gathering on one of their number’s porches awaiting the ironically booked limo to take them back to a high school which, emotionally, they appear never to have left.
From this setting, the play writes itself. Emotionally the characters are still in nappies – they have access to pot but are far from potty-trained. The “issues” bingo-card metaphorically handed out on entry is a full-house by the end of the night. Addiction, serious illness, PTSD, abortion, rape, rejection, dream-shattering, lies, truths, babies... Jacobs-Jenkins runs through the card.
His differential conceit is having each character step out of the piece to reveal that they are Death, sizing up the next to be taken and angling it to the pandemic (too soon, and under-explored here). Unfortunately, thanks to Emma Laxton’s heavy reverberation processing and Natasha Chivers harsh spotlighting, the monkey struggled to hear or see these sequences from the rear stalls.
In fairness, Arnulf Maldonado produces an impressively liveable Washington suburban frontage, bug light glowing, steps up to a deck with seating and a screen door over the real one. The limo, when it arrives, is also a neat effect.
Director Eric Ting strives equally to smooth out the unevenness of the play’s construction. It is extraordinarily peculiar that when stepping into the “Death” character each actor speaks with their own accent, British rather than American, which jars still further.
Outside of that, at least the confined boredom of small community life, with everybody knowing far too much about others business is credible, as are the juvenile behavioural traits we associate with the setting.
Yolanda Kettle as Caitlin, the stereotype all-American Blonde is the strongest written and is catalyst for back-stories – even if the trigger is a less than believable device.
Military doctor Kristina (Katie Leung) is sadly binary. From capable to burn-out, with the peculiarity of claiming to be an anaesthesiologist yet relating experiences as a solo surgeon at one point. Leung does what she can with the role, and the uniform helps.
Bereaved and partially sighted, as the owner of the home, Ursula is underwritten and permits few opportunities for Tamara Lawrance to reveal who she is. Her best scene comes when allowed to make a strong impact in a few lines at the end of the play, and are well done.
She shares her confidences with Emilio (Anthony Welsch), whose role is the opposite of hers – plenty of stage time, with his own final scene disappointingly causing us to rescind all the credit he has built during the preceding.
Completing the group, traumatised veteran Paco (Ferdinand Kingsley) is rendered superfluous after being forced to take on a role for which there is little explanation. It is to Kingsley’s considerable credit that he refuses to upstage a fellow actor’s monologue by skilfully avoiding drawing our focus in an ill-written scene.
In all the emotional blundering, the worst of all is that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins never truly explains “why.” He does, in a lengthy and not particularly well-placed exposition at the end expound a bit on how Death operates post-lockdown, reviewing working practises to maximise efficiency.
What we never get is an understanding of the emotional motivations of a single character, nor how exactly they relate to the concept of Death stepping out to address us in the first place.
If the idea that death is all around us at all times, we know that. These characters are intellectually dead and were probably never alive in the first place, so where is the concept that welds them?
A creatively bald work which fails to build a potentially interesting thought into a satisfactorily deep evening.
2 stars
Photo credit: Marc Brenner. Used by kind permission of the Almeida Theatre.