MANUEL SIMONSWRITER / DIRECTOR / ACTOR / EDUCATOR
A performer reaches upward on a platform as the audience watches.
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University of Florida · 2024 · Directed by Manuel Simons

Everybody

By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

A world built to look like a play.
A journey that refuses to remain one.

A PRODUCTION / A THEATRE / A DREAM?
01 / THE ENCOUNTER

God has come
to the theatre.

In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s contemporary reimagining of the medieval morality play Everyman, Death arrives with a summons: Everybody must account for the life they have lived. Everybody asks for company on the journey. Friendship, family, possessions, and love each become more than ideas when they stand before us as people.

My production began with a question: what if God appeared in the very theatre where the audience had gathered? The familiar blackbox became both the site of a performance and the place where Everybody’s reckoning might actually be happening. From the start, the line between staged event and lived reality was meant to feel unstable.

A seated performer faces two figures beneath scenic doors.
Two performers confront each other under a focused light.
Two performers share a scene beside a white table and scenic doors.
A performer reaches upward on a platform while another watches.
02 / THE WORLD

Look at the set.
Then look behind it.

The concept placed a set within the blackbox: a café, Everybody’s bedroom, and a middle-class living room. These spaces were imagined as deliberately flat, bright, and cartoonlike. A cup could be a painted silhouette; a table might be only the words “COFFEE TABLE.” Even the braces, casters, and other means of theatrical construction could remain visible.

That exposed artifice mattered. Everybody cannot be certain whether this is waking life, a dream, or a dream inside another dream. The scenery offered the audience the same uncertainty. A realistic sound might issue from an obviously two-dimensional object; a figure might cross out of a scene and into the audience. The performance could keep changing the rules of what counted as real.

Two performers meet across a table before the audience.
A performer in blue speaks to a seated figure.
A blue-costumed performer stands above another near the audience seats.
A performer in a yellow costume stands beside the stage.
A lone performer stands under a spotlight in the blackbox.
A performer kneels on a table amid patterned shadows.

THE COMPANY IN MOTION

One body.
Many lives.

Ensemble in skeletal costumes advances under purple light.
A group gathers in a narrow beam of light against darkness.
An ensemble moves through a cool blue wash.
The ensemble surrounds a figure on a table under blue light.
The ensemble reaches toward a performer before the scenic doors.
Performers gather around a table in blue and magenta light.
03 / THE RUPTURE

And then:
the earth.

The directing concept called for a decisive break in the visual language. Where the earlier world could be painted, thin, and visibly assembled, the grave would arrive with soil, weeds, leaves, dampness, and depth. The suddenly tangible earth would make mortality impossible to keep at the safe distance of an allegory.

Light, sound, costume, and props were conceived in relation to that shift: sometimes amplifying the cartoon world, sometimes contradicting it with ordinary human detail, and finally allowing the grave to feel startlingly present. The play’s humor and its fear belong in the same room.

Performers approach a graveyard setting.
Figures gather around an open grave.
A performer stands beside the revealed grave and headstone.

04 / WHY THIS PLAY

We do not get to return and correct the harm we do.

At the heart of my reading of Everybody is an urgent, simple demand: be kinder to one another and to the living world. The production’s theatrical games were a way to bring that demand closer. If everything around us can turn out to be a representation, our actions toward one another still have consequences.

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