Everybody is a wonder. Brilliant visuals, arresting acting, ingenious direction by Will Davis, a searching script by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and an overall generosity of spirit that imbues the show with the feeling that if the journey toward death is this lively and loving, there is nothing to fear.
But we do fear death, dying and are terrified that what we did (or didn’t do) in life will lead to an afterlife of such suffering and estrangement from our creator that it is beyond mortal comprehension. No one knew this more than the medievalists, for whom mortality and morality were foremost in people’s minds in their daily lives and in their theater.
Everybody updates the 15th-century morality play Everyman, which was a religious allegory about death and salvation performed in public places during church festivals, where the actors (supposedly monks) portrayed various virtues and vices to give the audience an entertaining moral lesson along with a shiveringly good scare that was to meant to frighten the audience into not straying from the straight and narrow.
Much of medieval drama echoes what we now call immersive theater, as make believe and reality became one during those festival days. The sacred danced with the pagan, the fantastic with the prosaic, and time was both finite and endless. In addition to the Everyman plays, there were mummers, reenactments of bible stories, games, processions and everyone’s creepy favorite, the dance of death—where the audience was encouraged to dance hand-in-hand with skeletons and therefore embrace and celebrate their communal fate. Everybody dies, strike up the band and let’s dance.
(Full disclosure: I was a medieval lit major and wrote my thesis on the Everyman play so this production at the Shakespeare Theatre, new artistic director Simon Godwin’s inaugural production, was so up my alley they might as well have greeted me at the Lansburgh with “Come on in and fall in love.”).
In this medieval spirit, but with a bright, contemporary twist, playwright Jacobs-Jenkins and the Shakespeare Theatre team have fashioned the Everyman play into Everybody, which playfully pays homage to the morality play while tackling such for-the-now issues as identity, representation and ever-shifting concepts of self.
Who knew that death could be so fun? And absurdly funny. Jacobs-Jenkins employs snippets and echoes of the original play along with original speech that point out the paradoxes between a modern world ruled by the individualistic, the “you do you” ethos and the more cosmic idea that we are more than our bodies and behaviors, something transient and hard to pin down—a spirit or life force borrowing flesh and bones for our brief time on earth.
Everybody closes November 17, 2019. Details and tickets
This randomness and incorporeal quality is seen in the staging itself, which involves five actors from the nine-member ensemble who don’t know which parts they are playing at any given performance until shortly after the show’s prologue.
A fearless choice on the playwright’s part, echoed in actors who dive into the uncertainty headlong and passionately, very much in the same way we plunge through life and rush toward our deaths in a breathtaking gulp.
Death (an incandescent Nancy Robinette) is always played by the same actor, as is God (Yonatan Gebeyehu, a performer who embraces the masculine, the feminine, the divine and the human into one fluid form you can’t take your eyes off of) and Love (Ahmad Kamal, projecting bigness in voice, movements and stature as if he is all heart in every aspect). While Jacob-Jenkins’ dialogue is smart and smarts with ironic observations, there are moments of poignancy that catch you off guard, such as when Love says to the anguished Everybody (on opening night, the electrifying Avi Roque), “I’ve been here all along.”
Everybody, who is going Somewhere—even Death isn’t quite sure what happens next—is in a panic over the very realness of shortly shuffling off that mortal coil and doesn’t want to go it alone. Everybody pleads with family (the protean Alina Collins Maldonado and Ayana Workman) and friends (Elan Zafir, a teddy bear-like BFF who is comically self-absorbed) for company and even though they swear eternal love and support, they back out and avoid commitment in hilarious and ruefully true ways.
Desperate, Everybody thinks their Stuff (Kelli Simpkins) will willingly go along for the trip—after all, Everybody owns their possessions, right? Simpkins is both shark-like and irresistible as she sets Everybody straight, evoking the maxim “you can’t take it with you” with such wicked glee you might look at your own stuff through newly suspicious eyes from now on.
The last part gets metaphysical, as Everybody surrenders to the inevitable. The production design (Scenic Designer Arnulfo Maldonado, Costume Designer Melissa Ng, Sound Designer and Composer Brendan Aanes, and Lighting Designer Barbara Samuels, led by director Will Davis) all along has been stunning—bright, bold and cinematic in a way that suggests Fellini, Bergman and Wenders (even Kubrick in the use of pure white light) without being slavish. Take the haunting skeleton dance scene, for instance—which recalls Bergman as his most magisterial but also the spooky, unsettling skeletons from the old Merrie Melodie cartoons.
Avi Roque’s journey as Everybody is confined to a light-filled box—which is either a coffin or a film set, depending on your point of view. The various stages of Everybody’s life are represented by balloons, simple metaphors for breath and life, as well as the vivid, flesh-and-blood allegorical characters calls to Everybody’s side. The end is more isolated and abstract, as Everybody’s faculties (sharply delineated by the ensemble) slip away one by one, leaving only Love. The play doesn’t tie everything together, as a medieval drama would in its dogged belief in a finite universe. Instead, Jacobs-Jenkins plants a dreamily waving question mark that brings about more ambiguities than comfort.
This movie-like approach works on two levels. First, it is a visual feast that never lets up. Second, it puts you in mind of near-death experiences, when people report that their life flashes before them like scenes from a movie.
Death may be familiar, mortality a constant. But you have never seen anything quite like the Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Everybody, a play about death that is like death itself—wondrous in its capacity to astonish.
Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins . Director: Will Davis . Featuring: Yonatan Gebeyehu, Nancy Robinette, Alina Collins Maldonado, Avi Roque, Kelli Simpkins, Ayana Workman, Elan Zafir, Clare Carys O’Connell, Ahmad Kamal. Scenic Designer: Arnulfo Maldonado. Costume Designer: Melissa Ng. Sound Designer and Composer: Brendan Aanes. Lighting Designer: Barbara Samuels. Fight and Intimacy Choreographer: Cliff Williams III. Production Stage Manager: Christopher Michael Borg.Produced by Shakespeare Theatre Company . Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.
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