Everybody
★★★
Paul Green Theatre, Chapel Hill
There’s more than a note of doubt—if not a playwright’s outright remorse—in the uneven opening monologue of Everybody, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation of the famous fifteenth-century drama Everyman, which is currently running at PlayMakers.
After an usher (Kathryn Hunter-Williams) riffs for a dilatory page on theater preshow announcements, her lines seem suddenly hijacked by an Intro to Theater professor who vends conventional dramaturgy on Everyman’s history before an apprehensive, ingratiating conclusion: “But, um, it’s safe to say we’re dealing with some fairly old and ancient material, so maybe let’s trust it to be really wise and meaningful, OK?”
If a playwright thinks a medieval morality play is that hard a sell for contemporary audiences, perhaps he should find a different line of merchandise.
After an initial frame festooned with footnotes, Jacobs-Jenkins dials down the ancient Christian terror of the Judgment Day to something more akin to a post-life PowerPoint presentation. Death itself, and not anything that may follow, holds the greatest fear in this watered-down take.
The title character is chosen from the ensemble by chance at each performance; on opening night, April Mae Davis played her with conviction. As in the original version, Everybody seeks out allegorical characters to accompany her through death to her appointment with God (played by Hunter-Williams).
Predictably, most forsake her: Friendship (given a vapid comic turn by Emily Bosco) drops out early, as do Kinship and Cousin (a wound-up Omolade Wey and an urbane Anthony August). After earthly possessions, personified as Stuff, won’t make the journey, we learn whether Love (an authoritative Trevor Johnson), Beauty, Mind, Strength, or Understanding will.
But director Orlando Pabotoy’s strange taste for darkness rarely pays off. A jaw-dropping fantasia of black-lit sea creatures and skeletons was a true coup de théâtre, but elsewhere, a lengthy monologue by God and a series of unlit transitional scenes in which friends conversed and argued just left us inexplicably in the dark.
But just as Jacobs-Jenkins’s allegories turn cheesy, Pabotoy re-anchors them in the wrenching graveside scene that closes the show. Even if Everybody bids us to consider our legacies more than our afterlives, there’s still food for thought at its end.
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