Riverside Theatre staging ‘Everybody,’ a modern retelling of 15th century ‘Everyman’

Everybody who sees “Everybody” at Iowa City’s Riverside Theatre in Iowa City will see a show different from everybody else who attends on a different day, July 21 to Aug. 6.

This 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins takes the 15th century morality play “Everyman,” and relates it to today’s audiences. One twist is that of the nine actors in “Everybody,” five don’t know what role they’ll be playing in each performance.

In front of the audience, cast and crew, their roles will be determined by a random lottery. That means those five actors have to learn every piece of dialogue for those characters, known simply as A, B, C, D and E (for Everybody).

In the beginning

“Everyman,” described as one of the earliest-known English-language plays, looked at society’s preparedness for death from a Christian perspective. In the modern retelling, characters A to D become Friendship, Kinship, Cousin, and Stuff, and one becomes Everybody. The other four actors portray one character throughout: Usher, Death, Love and Time, explained guest director Jacob Titus from New York, a longtime friend and colleague of Adam Knight, Riverside’s producing artistic director.

“In a nutshell, God is like, ‘The world has forgotten about me. The people have gone away from me.’ So he sends Death out to go get an everyman, an everybody. He says, ‘Go pick somebody else. Have them come before me and tell me why they lived the life the way they did.’ And so Death comes to a few audience members, pulls them out, and then we do a lottery in front of the audience,” Titus said.

“In the original play, it was teaching you how to die a good Christian death. You’re discovering Christ’s love, you’re discovering how to cleanse yourself. … It was a universal thing, because everybody was Christian in that society.

“And so now (with playwright) Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, it’s almost the exact same format. The language is updated a little bit to a more modern take, but it’s very much following the old one. And I think he’s trying to be as universal as the original was for that time’s society. It's amazing how well he has updated and transformed this play, because the bones of it are exactly the same, but if anything, it’s more fun,” Titus said.

“ … We’re talking about life and death, and its big ideas, but we’re having a lot of fun and being playful with it, because nobody wants a sermon. Some people may, but for the most part, I don’t go to the theater to have a sermon, I’m going for an experience.

“From the get-go, (the playwright) is trying to get us all together in a community, so we can experience someone else going through the questions of life or death in a very safe, careful, caring way, so the audience can go on this journey with us without having to be triggered the whole time.”

Titus saw a production of the play in New York a few weeks before he came to Iowa City, but death was wrapped up in cancer, which hit too close to home for him.

“It was beautifully written, but I needed a good therapy session afterwards, or an ice cream sundae,” he said.

Riverside’s production is “not that way at all,” he said. “It’s very gently taking us through this journey. It’s a lot of fun, and I think the lottery is just a part of it. It has that sense of adventure, that sense of playfulness that the original ‘Everyman’ has a little bit of, but this is just sort of amplifying a little bit to make it easier for us to talk about and experience.”

Rehearsals

The lottery aspect hasn’t made it easier for the actors and production crew.

“We've been doing a lot of repetition, which we do anyway when we’re working on shows,” Titus said, “but we've had to do a lot of rotating. So we'll set the staging for one group, and then we mix it up, then we let the next group do it. And then we mix it up, let the next group do it. And so we end up doing it to where the same scene gets rehearsed five times in a row. It's very time consuming, but it seemed like the best way for us to be able to accomplish it.”

The cast is up for the challenge, he noted.

“They’ve been amazing. The staging wouldn’t be quite as detailed as I would normally make it with a single cast in a play. It's more general — like they’ll be in certain areas, but instead of moving on the first line, one actor may move on the second line, and a different actor may move on the third line. There’s freedom within the form. So they have a rough structure, a framework, but within that, it’s going to be wildly different,” he said.

“Really, it’s been a lot of fun to watch, because like one actor is a little more cerebral or a little more intellectual, so their take on it is totally different than the one who’s way more passionate. If you were to watch the two of them, you’re seeing the exact same play, but it’s a totally different take, and it’s gonna resonate, and it’s gonna make you think about it in a different way,” he said.

“It’s been a lot of fun. Adam did such an amazing job of casting it. I know I keep saying it, but I can’t say enough good things about this cast.”

He also expects the show to spark lively conversations among audience members, perhaps making it easier to talk about the losses that became more prevalent during the pandemic.

“This is sort of like trying to strip away some of the unknown,” he said, “kind of strip away some of the mystery, and just have a nice gentle conversation about death.”

He said the playwright, whose other works can be a bit abrasive, is “entirely gentle about it. He’s really taking care of you, as an audience.”

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