). You see gestures and ideas repeated, many different attempts to get at similar feelings. Then you get to a play like, which channels and condenses what’s been floating in the ether and brings it all to earth. Here’s a drama where Branden Jacobs-Jenkins both sums up and reconfigures the present moment.is unassuming enough: The audience starts off looking at a suburban porch cloaked in twilight, where a group of high-school friends are getting together to pregame before their 20th reunion.
Aside from having Death intrude, Jacobs-Jenkins hews close to realism as he sets out the drama, and the character portraits are deft. Emilio’s a successful artist who’s condescended to return tofrom Berlin with all his old resentments riled up, and he immediately starts grousing to Ursula , who is hosting on her porch.
Jacobs-Jenkins unwinds this information through awkward, looping conversations that capture the simultaneous forced bonhomie and confusion of people trying to reacquaint themselves with one another. The production runs for an uninterrupted and demanding two hours and ten minutes, in keeping with the feeling that we’re slowly sinking into familiarity with these people and the darkness around their edges.
That’s all rich territory, and Eric Ting, directing, has honed this group of Off Broadway regulars to cutting precision. Eberhardt, as Emilio, carries the bulk of the drama—do what you will with the fact that Jacobs-Jenkins is, like the character, a successful artist who went to aand is 38 years old—but makes sure not to iron out the character’s recurring, self-destructive spikiness to be palatable.
Death is everywhere in the play, not just speaking to the audience directly but cropping up unbidden in everyone’s dialogue: those snapped necks, classmates in wars, victims of the pandemic, references to Columbine and 9/11 .
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