Everybody at Strawberry Theatre Workshop

I’m sure I am not the only person thrilled that a Seattle theater is producing Everybody, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2018 Pulitzer-Prize-nominated play. Based on Everyman, a medieval morality play in which the central allegorical character is summoned by Death to give an account of his life to God, Everybody has caught audience’s imaginations primarily with its random casting assignments. Most of the cast members go into the theater for each performance not knowing which part they will play. Five of the major parts, including Everybody him- or herself, are assigned to actors during the first scene.

Some people are just tickled that the cast is randomly assigned their parts. That’s pretty fun! It’s much more than a gimmick, though – it pulls the play’s central idea from the abstract into the blooded reality of five actors’ bodies. Everybody, the central character that stands in for each of us, could be anyone on a given night. Death, after all, is heedless of age, shape, race, or gender.

The medieval Everyman walks the audience unrelentingly through the impermanence of our lives and everything in them, right up to the edge of our own graves. It insists that we look into the grave and confront our own mortality. Everybody does so too, but is more relenting. We 21st-century folk, it seems to think, cannot bear facing eternity alone for long, and so it reprieves us momentarily with humor. It is a funny show, but it also gives its audience fleeting glimpses of a world without us and moments of existential pause. The grave is there for Everybody, and the walk it takes us on is worthwhile.

Everybody runs through this Saturday, Feb 16th, at 12th Ave. Arts. Tickets can be found here.