This dramaturgy website offers context for Everybody, a modern adaptation of a medieval morality play. It is designed to support audiences in exploring the play’s history, ideas, and questions before or after the performance. You do not need prior knowledge to engage with this material.

This dramaturgy website is designed to be explored in any order. You are welcome to read before seeing the play, return afterward, or simply browse what interests you most. （Each section stands on its own. There is no right or wrong place to begin.）

Use the menu at the top of the page to navigate:

• Home – An introduction to the project and how this site is meant to be used

• About Play – Background on Everybody, including its history, form, and themes

• Author – Information about the playwright and the adaptation

• Buddhism – Reflections on Buddhist ideas that resonate with the play’s questions

• Dramaturgs – Insights from the dramaturgy team and behind-the-scenes context

• Tickets – Performance details and ticket information

We live in a fast-paced world shaped by uncertainty. Life moves quickly, and we are encouraged to keep moving with it, to plan ahead, to stay productive, to look forward. Yet death does not follow our schedules. It can arrive suddenly, without warning, and few of us are ever truly prepared to face it. Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins asks us to slow down, to pause, and to make space for questions we often avoid. It asks us to think about questions of death, and of course, those are also questions about life.

In the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman, an anonymous author offered a simple but piercing lesson. Written within a Christian moral framework, the play imagines Death as a divine messenger who calls Everyman to account for his life. When Death calls, nothing we possess can follow us except the measure of our own actions. Salvation, in this tradition, depends not on wealth or status, but on moral reckoning. For more than five hundred years, the play has endured because it confronts a truth that resists historical boundaries. As long as people wrestle with meaning, morality, and impermanence, Everyman returns to remind us how fragile and fleeting our time together truly is. 

It is this long tradition that Jacobs-Jenkins inherits and transforms in Everybody. Rather than treating Everyman as a rigid historical work of Christian moral teaching about death and judgment, Jacobs-Jenkins reframes it as a contemporary encounter with mortality when we are forced to face it. The play does not ask audiences to observe death from afar. Instead, it insists that mortality is collective and unavoidable. As Ben Brantley noted in his review of the 2017 Off-Broadway production at Signature Theatre in New York City, “Everybody is everybody, and everybody—as you surely know, whether you’ve come to terms with the idea or not—is mortal.” 

Under Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation, the transformation of Everyman reshapes not only the play’s language but also its theatrical form. One of the choices is the lottery used to assign roles at each performance, ensuring that no two evenings are the same. As Peter Marks noted in his review of a 2019 production by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, “the characters will look different from the ones I saw, and isn’t that idiosyncrasy the truth of each of our own paths on the road to eternity?” In this context, the play’s central question becomes who or what will accompany you at the end. Everybody offers an answer, but not one that closes the conversation. Instead, it leaves space for each audience member to think through what remains meaningful, what endures, and what ultimately matters.

Performed in the intimate Studio Theatre at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, the play asks us to confront our attachments, our families, our routines, and our assumptions about control. The randomness of the casting echoes the contingency of our own lives, where roles shift and identities change, often without rehearsal. As the characters respond to Death’s summons, they do not reveal certainty or wisdom. They reveal vulnerability. 

While Everybody is filled with humor, spectacle, and moments of absurdity, its meditation is serious. How do we live knowing that we will die? What do we hold onto, and what do we let go? As this performance unfolds, we invite everybody to sit with these questions. When the time comes, who will walk with Everybody?

—Yingman Tang, Dramaturg