We’re all Everybody
IFyou attend Everybody at the Santa Fe Playhouse, you’ll see Emily Neifert in the title role. Or maybe not. It could be Antonio Miniño instead. Or Koppany Pusztai or David Stallings or Malcom Stokes. The program won’t help you figure it out either. In fact, none of the actors knows who it will be before the performance begins, when a name is drawn at random to decide.
This metaphor for the randomness of life is just one of several unique aspects to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2017 play, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and “fills the heart in a new and unexpected way,” according to The New Yorker. A MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner, Jacobs-Jenkins has also been called “one of this country’s most original and illuminating writers” by The New York Times.
His Everybody is an extended contemporary riff on the medieval morality play Everyman, first performed circa 1500. In it, an ordinary chap is told that he faces an accounting of his life after he dies to determine whether he’s worthy to enter heaven and that he has just a short time left on Earth.
On his last journey, Everyman tries to enlist such companions as Knowledge, Beauty, and Strength to aid his cause. (Most of the play’s “characters” are personified concepts.) Eventually Everyman learns that Good Deeds are all he can bring with him to the reckoning, since everything else is transitory. (Well, it’s actually the deeds plus sacraments such as confession, penance, and the Eucharist, since the play was essentially a propaganda piece for Catholicism.)
We’re all on the same journey today, of course, and Everybody explores life’s most fascinating and terrifying aspect — death — through a variety of contemporary perspectives.
In explaining why she chose it as part of the Playhouse’s centennial season, artistic director Robyn Rikoon says, “We wanted to represent multiple eras and appeal to multiple audiences, as well as present different forms of theater, and Everybody is a very modern reinterpretation of the English language’s oldest play.”
For Rikoon, one scene in particular compelled her to make the choice. “When Everybody finally meets Love, Love strips them [This is “them” as the gender-neutral singular; it refers to Everybody the character, who is sometimes played by a male actor and sometimes by a female] down to their most vulnerable state,” she said, “and then puts them through this huge theatrical moment of catharsis and realization. It was so beautiful to me, and none of the other plays we were considering had anything like this aspect.”
In casting the five actors who play Everybody, director Zoe Lesser deliberately emphasized variety rather than aiming for five very similar interpretations. “I wanted to have the most diverse possible cast in terms of personalities,” she said, “and actors who are compelling when they aren’t doing anything at all onstage.” Her thumbnail sketches of the Everybodys: “One is extremely desperate, one is extremely confident, two are advocates for the audience, and one is a combination of goofy and frustrated.”
The five Everybodys have to memorize most of the script, because who they play when they aren’t Everybody changes based on who’s doing the role. (New York’s Signature Theatre, where it premiered, calculated that there were 120 who-plays-who permutations.) Lesser compares the rehearsal process to something resembling matryoshka, the Russian nesting
Everything God says is in capital letters, and the character’s grandiloquent opening soliloquy ends with “DEATH! DEATH! REVEAL YOURSELF!” Death responds, “Hey. How are you?”
dolls. “It’s like we’re doing five different plays, each of which has five different plays within it.”
Another Jacobs-Jenkins’ innovation is the deliberate collision of dramatic styles — in Everybody they include naturalism, Brechtian epic theater, ritual drama, dance, and puppetry — with lightning-fast shifts in tone. Here’s a sample: Everything God says is in capital letters, and the character’s grandiloquent opening soliloquy ends with “DEATH! DEATH! REVEAL YOURSELF!” Death responds, “Hey. How are you?”
The play also deals with theatrical space and actor/audience relationships in unexpected ways. Lesser believes the result will be “a transformative night at the theater” for attendees.
Neifert, one of the Everybodys, sees the play’s refusal to provide pat answers as its greatest strength. “It doesn’t profess a religious creed or a spiritual system or any answer to what happens at that moment of demise,” she said. “We get right up to it, and it’s still a mystery.”
The playwright does provide a suggestion for what we should focus on until we reach that moment, through the addition of a character who doesn’t appear in Everyman. “Love has been hiding in the open for the first three-quarters of the play, and we finally see it,” she said. “The scene with Stuff, right before it, is written in a romantic way, and then when Love appears, it’s a different kind of love, not the attachment we have to possessions and the trappings of our lives.”
In addition to Neifert and the other Everybodys, Bianca Thompson is the Usher, who, as Lesser puts it, “helps the audience understand how to think about the play.” Jess Haring plays Love, and Dharm Andrew Segal is Death. Child actors Annabelle Briggs, Mazen Litz, Rosa María MarshMartínez, and Amaya Thompson share the role of Time.
It seems appropriate that Death should have the final word. “Everyone involved has gone through such personal changes from working on Everybody,” Segal said, “because it touches on so many different critically important subjects. There are lots of moments to laugh and lots to make you squirm in your seat. We all have this lineage from all those who passed on this thing we called life. Each of us is a success story back through millions of generations of life and of death.”
details
Everybody Santa Fe Playhouse, 142 E. De Vargas St. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 18, and Thursday-Saturday, June 23-July 9, 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, June 25-July 10 Tickets are $30-$75 with discounts available; 505-988-4262, santafeplayhouse.org