DirectION
director's NOTE
“How have you lived your life and why?”
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ asks us these questions throughout Everybody, but how often do we consider what they mean to us? Today’s world is complicated, arguably more complicated than the 15th century world of the original audience of Everyman (the direct source material for this adaptation). Daily we are bombarded with personal struggles, political posturing, global crises, and economic turns as we navigate a variety of often unjust systems. Attention has become a commodity. When we direct our attention to a specific cause, issue, or event, we invest in its outcome. There’s a Christian hymn that goes, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.” So where are you directing your precious attention? Where have you placed your heart?
During the performance, direct your attention outward toward the play at hand, but also inward. Jenkins-Jacobs offers us many questions through this piece. He places them in the mouths of characters and concepts with whom I believe we all have some personal relationship. Whether you are religious, spiritual, or atheistic; political or apolitical; community-focused or a recluse, we all share this common place. And within that place, we may also share a connection to other places and communities. And within those places and communities, we are connected through many different people. How do we live our lives in relation to these people and places? Where do we see injustice in these spaces and how do we acknowledge it? Where do we hear and when do we ignore creation and its cries for mercy, justice, or love? What prompts us to take a stand when we do, and how do we take steps toward reconciliation, restoration, or reparation?
I invite you to consider these questions throughout your experience here with Everybody. Contribute your thoughts and reflections to one of our guest books in the lobby. Create a postcard to God answering what you hear creation crying out for justice against us. Explore the various cultural understandings of death and the meaning of life in our dramaturgical display in the lobby. Join us for a meal and post show workshop after our Sunday matinees to engage in these topics collectively with our company and other audience members. I encourage you to stay connected to these questions during your time here with Everybody and beyond.
Kristina Friedgen
Direction
Within the play, Everybody is called by God to give a presentation of their life and how they lived it. This struck me as a core concept to explore through the design of the show. Based on this, I honed in on the idea of archives and the performance of reporting or presenting. How could we communicate a place to set the show that would be flexible enough to encourage audience's to imagine some of their own specific experiences on top of the scene. From here, the idea of setting the play in a museum came to be.
Working within the concept that the journey from life to death places Everybody in a museum space from which they cannot escape, the ensemble and designers developed some fruitful images that translated into visual metaphors I wove into the staging of the show. In particular, the idea of Death's "lasso" or rope chain was borne of some essence work moment making. Several moments created in that process made use of an elastaband that began to develop the visual metaphor of Death's rope and handcuffs. For me these became symbols of the tether which we can feel attaching us to life. But as Death selects the Everybody for each performance, she ends the act by handcuffing them, chaining them to the journey as they search to find a companion who will wear the other half of the cuffs.
