About the Play:

Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Everybody is a full-length morality play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. This contemporary take on the medieval morality play Everyman follows Everybody (chosen from the cast via lottery at each performance) as they question and explore life's most basic and universal elements of death, love, friendship, family, God. etc. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins bases Everybody on the iconic medieval play that instructs sinners on how to repent and seek redemption.

Everybody is a fourth-wall-defying contemporary adaptation of the 15th-century morality play The Summoning of Everyman. The protagonist, Everybody, has come to the end of life and is being summoned by the one "upstairs," and so begins the revelatory and mysterious journey towards what lies beyond. But Everybody doesn't want to greet Death alone, so Everybody seeks the company of their friends Stuff, Kinship, Friendship, Cousinship, and Love to make the trip bearable. As relationships, memories, and senses fade away, Everybody is left to travel down the road that leads to the bittersweet truth that we all eventually must face. Everybody answers the questions, "What happens when we die?," "What do we get to take with us?" and "Will we be ready when the time comes?" The core company of actors will be cast by lottery each night, letting fate decide the journey, so – as is true in life – Everybody could be anybody. And in the end, when it's your time to go, what will you leave behind and what will you take with you? At any given performance, audiences will see a version of the show that has never been performed, out of 120 possible variations.

Everybody premiered in 2017 at the Signature Theatre off-Broadway in New York City and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play is regularly performed in regional, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 9 female or male (doubling, flexible casting)

What people say:

"This is theatre rather unlike anything you might have seen…unusual, unconventional and eye-opening…Everyman is no barrel of laughs, being a morality play about death. Everybody tells the same tale, with equal emotional heft; but it is not only provocative and involving, it is also funny. Wildly funny, in fact." — Huffington Post

"…[a] very meta and saucy adaptation…." — Time Out NY

"Lovely. Fills the heart in a new and unexpected way." — The New Yorker

About the Playwright:

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an African-American playwright. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a two-time Obie Award winner, a MacArthur "Genius Grant" Award recipient, and was awarded the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Theatre Award, among many other honours.