You’re Dying, Everybody: A Mini Theatre Review

"You're dying, Everybody. And you're dying alone." A poignant, yet comic twist on a 14th-century morality play emerges at UMass Amherst Theater. Through the vision of director Rudy Ramirez, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2018 comedy, Everybody, hits home for audiences in the midst of a global pandemic that has highlighted the ruthlessness and unpredictability of death. Through its cathartic wit and humor, Everybody gives viewers permission to grapple with the idea that everybody dies.

The main character themself is Everybody, surrounded by a cast of Somebodies representing all that matters to us in life, from friendship, to love, to material possessions. Played by a rotating cast of actors, these characters tell the story of what should have been a fun night at the theatre before death came for Everybody. Using the theatre itself as its set and placing the audience within the world of the performance, Everybody leaves the viewers in the dark as to whether the events in the play are true or fictional, seemingly taking place simultaneously in both the dream world and in reality. In the play’s one act, Everybody visits with the many people and things they wish they could take with them after death through a mixture of humor, conflict, and poetic movement before finally returning to Death and descending into their grave, having learned all that they must leave behind and the two things that they must take. Everybody’s journey is one of intense emotion and satire brought together in an artistic expression of vivid theatricality that touches at the roots of death as an inescapable entity. Everybody is unique in that it takes one of the most feared changes in life - its end - and presents it to a society both capricious and unchanging through the manipulation of death as life’s most secure asset and only constant. It is in this way that Everybody intrinsically succeeds.