In his Foreword to the 1966 Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien famously declared, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations.” The context for that statement was an attempt to refute all the literary pundits who had recently attempted to interpret elements of his great work of fantasy as metaphors for World War II: Sauron as Hitler, the One Ring as nuclear weaponry and so on. In addition to a reminder that “his” World War had been the first one, when the young Tolkien had experienced the horrific Battle of the Somme and endured the loss of many friends, he was clear on the point that he simply wanted to tell a cracking good story.
Many readers, however, have also seen in this quote a bit of snark aimed at Tolkien’s longtime friend and fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis, whose own major works of fantasy, the Chronicles of Narnia, are so stuffed with obvious Christian allegory that it’s near-impossible for an adult reader to dodge the conclusion that Aslan = Jesus. While Tolkien’s “legendarium” was deeply informed by his Roman Catholicism, he kept it on the down-low and tried to avoid being overtly preachy.
Lewis, for his part, was heavily influenced by one of the most tumescent works of theological fiction in the canon of English literature: John Bunyan’s 1678 explicitly allegorical The Pilgrim’s Progress. The latter is quite a slog to read, populated by characters literally named for a variety of virtues, vices and personal traits, plus a number of place-names that have made it into popular parlance, such as the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair and House Beautiful. But Bunyan himself was drawing on a tradition, well-established by his time, of “morality plays” that were often performed at fairs and religious festivals.
Of these, the one best-remembered in our day is The Summoning of Everyman, written in Middle English by an unknown author near the end of the 15th century; its first recorded performance was in 1510. Modern scholarship leans toward it being a translation from a 1470 Dutch morality play titled Elckerlijc, attributed to Peter van Diest a/k/a Petrus Dorlandus. Tolkien, who did a lot of translating from Middle English early in his academic career (his version of Beowulf was long considered the standard), would have been deeply familiar with Everyman and obliged to teach it in his classes at Oxford. It’s considerably shorter and less bloated than Pilgrim’s Progress, though it also features a cast of explicitly allegorical characters.
The play begins with a long rant by God about humanity turning away from Him, lured by earthly pleasures. He’s in a mood to do some smiting. The titular protagonist is then confronted by Death with the news that it’s his final day among the living, and he has one last chance to find some faithful companion willing to accompany him to the grave. The companions in whom Everyman has placed his trust – Fellowship, Kindred, Goods, Beauty, Strength, Discretion and his Five Wits – all either refuse outright or bail from the quest before the end. Only Good Deeds, assisted by Wisdom and Confession, are of any avail in helping Everyman make his final “reckoning” before God.
Everyman has been performed and interpreted countless times over the past half-millennium. In 2017, a modern adaptation by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins titled Everybody had its Off-Broadway premiere, performed by the Signature Theatre Company. Not only does it transcend the original’s use of “man” as the generic descriptor of humanity, but it also “plays up the randomness of death and the universality of the human condition” by assigning different roles to a core group of actors with each performance. The cast draws lots early in the play to determine who will portray the protagonist as well as their intended companions to the afterlife. Of the major characters, only God, Death and Love – the latter of whom combines Good Deeds, Wisdom and Confession from Everyman – are consistently played by the same actor.
Everybody is the latest mainstage offering from the Department of Theatre Arts at SUNY New Paltz, opening the weekend of March 3 to 5 and set to return March 23 through 26 following spring break. This production is directed by Brittany Proia, an adjunct professor well-known to many drama buffs in the community for her years as founding co-artistic director and managing director of Denizen Theatre.
Jacobs-Jenkins’ adaptation goes for the funnybone, somehow extracting an ample serving of absurdist humor from a work that was deadly serious in its original moralistic intent. Some of that effect is achieved via the gender-fluidity of the casting, some by the literalness in which certain characters’ essence is conveyed.
Stuff, for example – Goods in the original – can’t budge and go to the afterlife along with Everyman/Everybody because, well, “You can’t take it with you.” (The original play is believed to have been written for an audience of decadent merchants who believed that they could buy their way into Heaven through almsgiving.) So this personification of worldly wealth is confined to an office chair throughout their performance. On the evening that HV1 took in the show, the actor chosen by lot for the part of Stuff from the ensemble of Parker Howland, Brie Acosta, Khalil Coates, Zack Tashoff and Nora Hamre played it in dazzling high-camp style while zooming in and out of Parker Theatre and around the stage in their wheeled chair. The audience went wild.
Part of the intent behind the current SUNY New Paltz production is to reflect the randomness of mortality that struck home so profoundly during the recent COVID epidemic, echoing the context of the original Dutch play that was written in the wake of the Black Death. It’s estimated today that the repeated visitations of bubonic and pneumonic plague in the 14th and 15th centuries took out as much as 50 percent of the population of Europe, inspiring traditional songs like “Death and the Lady” and an extensive body of artworks depicting the Danse Macabre. The latter is incorporated into this production of Everybody in the form of a wild dance number featuring giant skeleton puppets outlined in luminescent paints and performed under ultraviolet lights. It’s definitely a highlight of the show, and reason in itself to attend.
Since the cast takes on parts on a rotating basis, it’s impossible for this reviewer to give shout-outs to specific actors, except for the few who fill the same role consistently: Rrenee Desgrottes as God, Sean Walsh as Death and Luke Anderson as Love. All are strong players, though much of Desgrottes’ soliloquy as a petulant, narcissistic Creator was muddied by deliberately distorted vocal effects. We can hope that by the second weekend of the show, the sound design will have been tweaked for greater clarity in a roomful of listeners.
More problematic on the playwright’s part, we found, was the conflation of three characters with disparate roles in Everyman into a single persona under the misleading name of Love. While Good Deeds is the only character who will vouch for Everyman’s worthiness of a heavenly reward in his “reckoning,” the protagonist must first undergo Confession, dramatized with an episode of self-flagellation. When the composite character is renamed Love, portrayed by a decidedly genderfluid actor who lectures Everybody about the need for humiliation and orders them to strip down to their undergarments, a whole new and rather queasy undertone of BDSM is introduced into the story. Is that what “Love” really entails? We found this approach off-putting and not very funny.
Overall, though, this production of Everybody is wildly entertaining, offbeat and thought-provoking, bringing a stodgy medieval relic into the modern world in ways that dust off its relevance as a meditation on mortality and what ultimately matters in the course of a human lifetime. It will return to the Parker Theatre on the SUNY New Paltz campus at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, March 23 through 25 and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 26. Tickets cost $9 each for all performances. To order, visit www.newpaltz.edu/fpa/theatre/productions/mainstage.
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