EVERYBODY

If 90 minutes of occasionally amusing but more often longwinded philosophizing about the meaning of (among other things) Life, Love, Friendship, Beauty, Material Possessions, and Death sounds like your thing, then Antaeus Theatre Company’s Everybody, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ 21st-century adaptation of a 600-year-old morality play, might just be your cup of tea. It wasn’t mine.

Things start out entertainingly enough with God (Cherish Monique Duke) delivering the customary preshow announcements in standup comic mode while informing us that what we’re about to see was written way back when plays used (according to Wikipedia) “allegorical characters to examine the question of Christian salvation and what Man must do to attain it.”

In other words, abandon any notion of seeing real people face real-life problems, but instead get ready to follow “Everybody” (Harry Groener*) on an existential journey during which he will encounter Friendship (Gerard Joseph*), Mind (Antonio Jaramillo*), Stuff (Nicole Erb), Kinship (Lisa Sanaye Dring*), and most significant of all, Death (Ann Gee Byrd) on his way to heaven? hell? somewhere else?

Everybody’s plot, if you can call it that, revolves around Everbody’s efforts to convince at least one of the above abstract concepts to accompany him to wherever he’s going now that Death has shown up on his doorstep.

Perhaps not surprisingly, each has a reason to stay right where they are, though Love (Alberto Isaac) might prove the exception.

Lastly, there’s a preteen character called Girl (Dawn Didawick), played (ironically?) by one of the production’s more senior members.

Playwright Jacobs-Jenkins does his best to liven things up with occasionally snappy patter, and a spooky “Dance Macabre” features half a dozen dancing skeletons (choreographed with plenty of joie de mourir by Annie Yee), but Everybody (both the play and the character) is so prone to rambling that despite the best efforts of director Jennifer Chang (in remarkably imaginative form) and a splendid cast (in particular a tour-de-force Groener), I found myself wondering how soon Everybody’s ninety-minute running time would reach its end.

Everybody’s production design is nothing short of sensational, though even the combined talents of Nicholas Ponting (set and props), Adriana Lámbarri (costumes), Brian Ealey (lighting), Salvador Zamora (sound), and Yi-Chen Lee (projections) weren’t enough to hold my steadily flagging interest.

On a more positive note, since neither Dring nor Erb nor Groener nor Jaramillo nor Joseph know which character they’ll be playing at any given performance, the fab five deserve major snaps for committing the entire script to memory.

Ryan McRee is dramaturg. Kendra Ware is assistant director. Carly DW Bones is intimacy director. Lucy Pollak is publicist.

Trixie Eunhae Hong is production stage manager and Jessica Osorio is assistant stage manager.

I can see why a director, cast, and design team might be attracted to Everybody for both the challenges it poses and the opportunities it affords them to do something out of the ordinary.

I. on the other hand, would have preferred to spend the same hour and a half watching something more closely approximating simple everyday life. Ordinary would have been perfectly fine with me.

*At the performance reviewed here

Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center, 110 East Broadway, Glendale.
www.Antaeus.org

–Steven Stanley
September 23, 2022
Photos: Jenny Graham

 

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