Tenth International Colloquium

S.I.T.M. Groningen, Netherlands 2001

EVERYMAN AT THE MILLENIUM

The year 2001 marks the centenary of medieval drama in modern production. It was exactly 100 years ago, in July 1901, that William Poel presented the first performance of his revival of Everyman — not merely its first modern production, but the first recorded stage revival of a medieval play. The occasion offers us an opportunity to celebrate the collective creative process of investigation and discovery that has unfolded since that time, beginning in a small way in the courtyard of the Charterhouse in London, and expanding to the astonishing dimensions of current activity, from community extravaganzas like the 16 hour complete York Cycle in Toronto 1998, to brilliant professional productions: most memorably, Bill Bryden and Tony Harrison’s amazing three-evening evocation of The Mysteries at the Royal National Theatre.

So let me say a few words in praise of revivals. Staging a medieval play, or indeed any other ancient play, is a very thoroughgoing way of re-reading it; indeed some would argue, the only satisfactory way of understanding and interpreting its text. Any dramatic text, however full of stage directions, is only the blueprint for a performance. When a play is produced the primary interpretive act is visualization, creating on a stage in three dimensions what has only been suggested on the page. The word is made flesh, as characters gradually are inhabited and vivified by living actors, acquiring movements searching for motivations, donning costumes and provided with physical settings, to interact with other actors. In this process the actors create images which derive from the original script , but inevitably reflect the present circumstances in which the performance is transpiring. Even a production which sets out to reproduce the original circumstances of the text in every detail, as an antiquarian reconstruction, inevitably mirrors the time of its own performance as well. Looking at William Poel’s Everyman today, if we could magically replicate it, would tell us a great deal more about the world of one hundred years ago than it would of the time of Everyman’s inception. That is the very nature of theatre as a mimetic art, whose purpose, as Shakespeare has Hamlet remind us,

For these very good reasons, a revival of an old play is not merely a resurrection of an ancient text and story, but a representation of our relationship to it. We revive medieval plays on contemporary stages to explore their antiquity, and in the process to discover ourselves within them. In the end what transpires on that stage (or pageant wagon) is a contemporary event in our own real time.

Everyman in its original circumstances was an inspired English translation of a Dutch Rederijker drama, a performed allegorical treatise created to demonstrate systematically the efficacy of Christian doctrine and ritual, specifically the sacrament of Penance and the forgiveness of sins. Poel’s production of Everyman. in the year of Queen Victoria’s death, had very different goals. It challenged the stodgy stage conventions of the Victorian theatre, and in effect called its Victorian audience to a reckoning, questioning the vaunted solidity of their material and spiritual values.

So persuasive was Poel’s production that in the process of its wild success, and multiple performances across England and America between 1901 and 1929, Everyman came to be recognized as one of the great classic plays of Western theatre; it can be found today representing the Middle Ages in virtually any anthology of drama that attempts to span the distance from Aeschylus to Beckett. What then does Everyman mean to us today, apart from its presence in the much-discussed and indeed belittled "canon" of classic works? That seems to me a question best answered on stage. Fortunately, as time ran out on the twentieth century, three outstanding professional productions of Everyman appeared in England and America, entirely independent of one another.

Steppenwolf Theatre, on the North side of Chicago, is a bastion of gritty realistic theatre in the American tradition, famous for its no-holds-barred productions of Sam Shepard and David Mamet. In this unlikely location, on a freezing December night in 1995, I was privileged to see a remarkable production of Everyman unfold under the direction of Frank

Galati, one of America’s most gifted directors. Galati had won national and international acclaim for his stage adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath, with its evocation of American life in the Dust Bowl and Depression era of the 1930’s.

The Christmas season in American professional theatres is generally devoted to recycled sentimental productions of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the theatrical equivalent of The Nutcracker in the dance world, or Pantomime in England: in short, an occasion for making money rather than art. To understand why Galati and Steppenwolf might turn to the sternest of medieval plays at that juncture requires a bit of historical perspective. The medical advances of the twentieth century, which saw the abolition of virtually all lethal childhood diseases, spectacularly increased life expectancy and spread penicillin, antibiotics, and birth control pills throughout the Western world, ushering in the so-called sexual and cultural revolution of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, and with it a euphoric sense of invulnerability unimaginable a century earlier — or indeed, a decade later.

The outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s cast an unexpected and terrifying shadow across our culture, one that impacted the artistic and theatre communities with particular poignancy. While AIDS was never mentioned on the stage in Galati’s production, it was the unspoken contemporary context for the events of Everyman.

The production choice which most visually and audibly embodied this reality was the presence onstage throughout the performance of the Windy City Gay Chorus, a Chicago gay men’s choral group, flanking the stage on two sides. Their skillful and passionate singing, interpolated between scenes of the play, ranged from medieval plainchant to the thumping revival hymn "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder." To remind the audience ironically of the Christmas season, Galati also had the chorus sing LeRoy Anderson’s "Sleighride", the last word in saccharin Yuletide nostalgia.

But moments of kitch were few and far between in this powerful Steppenwolf production, a somber and compelling performance by a fully professional cast. Its earthly action opened with an evocation of the pre-AIDS world, where "earthly decadence takes the form of a dance club, where bacchanalian sex of all varieties is suggested by the gyrations of a youthful, self-satisfied crowd." It was into this context that the summoning of Everyman unexpectedly intruded. The most inspired of Galati’s many daring directorial choices was his decision to leave the casting of the title role up to blind fate. At every performance four actors, male and female, were ready to play the part of Everyman, but the decision was a matter of pure chance, based on the passing among the players of four books, one of which contained the order to play the role. At a signal the four books were opened simultaneously; only then did one actor become Everyman.

The coming of Death was also given strong sexual overtones. Alluring and female, she embraced Everyman literally as well as figuratively, in delivering her message — an implacable medieval presence invading our century’s reality. Galati found homespun American settings for the sequence of scenes in which Everyman’s friends and family learn of his summons, and make their various excuses for not going along on the journey. Fellowship was busy playing backyard basketball, two on two. Kindred, a kissing cousin, had a flash camera and a downhome Southern accent.

Only in the decision to divide the vital role of Good Deeds in two, dressing the two female actors as nurse and enfeebled patient, did Galati’s inspiration temporarily desert him. When strongly cast, Good Deeds can emerge as the protagonist of the play, a driving force in bringing Everyman to a realization that it is not too late to save his soul. But here Galati’s dark vision of the play seemed to preclude any easy ways out of Everyman’s dilemma. Far from humorless despite this, the production crackled with mordant wit, and evoke more laughs than I had ever heard in an Everyman production. This was an Everyman that shimmered with integrity and foreboding. In the setting designed by John Paoletti, the play’s ending was stunningly theatrical.

This ending was also true to the apotheosis (less clear in the text of Everyman) which the author of Elckerlijc clearly envisioned:

The dove flew unerringly over the audience’s head, disappearing joyfully into the liberation of eternity (or more precisely, a hidden dovecote above the theatre’s light booth) bearing its message of hope. Galati’s brave — one might almost say foolhardy— insistence on staging the Lenten parable of Everyman in the middle of the Christmas season deserves praise in its own right. But his brilliant success in making Everyman come alive in dark times, to sear us with fear and pity, and thrill our hearts with optimism, deserves a hosanna. That night it seemed to me, as I later wrote in a published review, "one of the great medieval drama productions of all time."

* * * * *

Less than a year later, in November 1996, another remarkable Everyman inaugurated the new season of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. The production, which amazingly enough marked the RSC’s first attempt to stage a medieval text, was a part of a season of medieval drama organized by the director Katie Mitchell for performance in repertory at The Other Place, an intimate 107 seat theatre where much of that company’s most adventurous work is premiered.

All the same, arriving eight months into the season in high summer, I took some special pleasure in the sign posted outside the main Stratford box office: "Everyman sold out/ seats available for Romeo and Juliet." The word on the street was that Everyman was not to be missed.

That this particular production happened at all was something of a coincidence. Mitchell, preoccupied with staging her own two-part adaptation from the mystery cycles, had offered a third pre-Shakespearean production to the actress-director Kathryn Hunter, not even specifying what sort of play it might be. "She sent us a pile of plays," Mitchell recalled, "The Second Shepherd’s Play, a play called Mankind, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, all those. There was something about the simplicity of Everyman, that simple journey to the grave, that appealed to us."

Mitchell’s invitation was indeed a risky proposition. "Us" in this case was Hunter and her partner Marcello Magni, two members of the innovative and highly trendy physical theatre-based Theatre de Complicité, a troupe of former students of the French mime Jacques LeCoq. Complicité had come to prominence in London with a series of productions in which they played fast and loose with adapted texts of out-of-the-way novels, such as Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles. Magni himself was an Italian trained in commedia dell’arte, not exactly the performance style usually associated with Everyman.

However the version of Everyman which Hunter and Magni created, in collaboration with six superbly inventive actors, proved to be deeply faithful to both the letter and spirit of the original. With only minor cuts, and the consolidation of Discretion and Five Wits into a single character, the Stratford Everyman took the full text as its brief, including even the lengthy excursus on the power of the priesthood frequently cut in production since Poel’s era. It was close enough textually to the original to justify the special printing of a new edition of the play, which was offered for sale as a program.

The set, designed by Rosa Maggiore, another Complicité veteran, was rustic in its simplicity, earthy and tiny in comparison to the towering heights of the Chicago Everyman.

There was a bare brown floor with real earth, and cracks suggesting a parched landscape, with two small piles of rocks and a metal wash tub. Upstage stood a ladder to a raised platform, from which a leafless tree branch (Eden? Waiting for Godot?) extended. In the wash tub a naked body (the African-American actor Joseph Mydell) lay dead to the world. An old woman (Myra McFadden) came on and wordlessly washed his limbs — a kind of baptism, with sensual overtones — and Everyman awakened. As he arose from his bath and dressed, putting on a Rolex watch and elegant fashionable clothes to attend a wedding, he became a living individual of our times, in a specific social circumstance. Before a word of the text had been spoken, Hunter and Magni had created a sustainable world for the play, blending timeless simplicity with a grounding in a time and place recognizably our own.

Offstage music of an accordion and violin lured Everyman off to play his role as Best Man at the wedding; only then did the words of the Messenger’s prologue commence, spoken by the old woman, calling on us to give audience to the Summoning of Everyman. Ninety minutes later, as the play concluded, the dying Everyman was led to his grave, the same tub from which he had emerged. And it was Good Deeds, played by the same Myra McFadden whom we had first met as the old woman, who accompanied him. The symmetry of the actions was characteristic of the charged visual meaning of the performance in its smallest details, as was the thrilling epilogue in which Everyman rose up and climbed the ladder to heaven, to be cradled in a pietá in the welcoming arms of an angel, as Good Deeds remained below, mourning Everyman’s death.

In the intervening space between these vivid opening and closing scenes, Hunter and Magni devised an Everyman rooted in timeless everyday realities and unexpected stage traditions. It was not the Everyman of the dutiful parish hall pageant.

Yet Everyman’s encounter with death came in a context strikingly similar to that of the Chicago production. It occurred in the midst of a wedding dance turned danse macabre, and Death, again, was a sensuously dressed woman (the British black actress Josette Bushell-Mingo). The music, however, was Balkan or Mediterranean, and it played on offstage as Everyman turned to the groom, his male friend Fellowship, for help. Their moment together had a revealing intimacy, suggesting a possible former Homoerotic connection, and making Fellowship’s rejection of Everyman all the more powerful.

Goods was another guest at the wedding, a jovial Mafioso with gold chains about his neck and a gold tooth in his smiling mouth. His rejection led directly to the discovery of Good Deeds: paralyzed and disease-ridden on the earthen floor, and angry with the neglectful Everyman.

Not all of Hunter and Magni’s staging ideas were equally based in the text or even dramatically justified. Many critics complained about the extraneous comedic inventions of the production.

Coming in for nearly universal condemnation was an ecumenical sequence devised to illustrate the text’s passing reference to "sinful priests."

Despite these questionable production choices, or perhaps partly because of them, Hunter and Magni’s production lifted Everyman to life with a freshness and a passion that touched its audience, confronting us with our own worst fears —that the fabric of possessions and relationships on which we base our lives could be ripped from us at any moment, leaving us at the mercy of a seemingly indifferent universe.

Many of the reviewers who praised the production in Stratford, and in its subsequent performances in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Plymouth, the Barbican Center in London and eventually the BAM Festival in New York, seemed to imagine that the play had lain neglected and unproduced since its restaging by Poel in 1901. Marion O’Connor notes tellingly that this misconception, perhaps encouraged by RSC publicists, neglects the huge commercial success of Everyman from 1901 on to 1929, in successive productions throughout England and America by Poel, Ben Greet and Nugent Monck.

* * * * *

Meanwhile in California, something completely different was going on. Beginning in 1994 and continuing through 1998, a Los Angeles-based group called Cornerstone Theatre Company had been performing their own extraordinary version of Everyman. Seeing the play as an implicit attack on materialism, exposing the illusions of earthly priorities, Cornerstone plotted an invasion of the shrine of contemporary American consumerism, the glittering shopping mall. There, in the sacred space of "a twentieth century cathedral," they presented an updated version of the fifteenth century drama entitled Everyman at the Mall.

Founded by a group of Harvard graduates in 1985, Cornerstone Theatre sees its mission as building bridges between diverse communities, using theatre as a means of discovery, Pursuing this refreshingly idealistic goal in hostile times, this non-profit theatre troupe has made a practice of producing classic texts in unlikely locations, frequently using local "first time community collaborators" alongside experienced professionals. Their previous productions have ranged from Hamlet in a decaying South Dakota farm town to Three Sisters From West Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and a touring multi-regional and multicultural Winter’s Tale that covered 9,000 miles by bus across America, culminating in a performance in the shadow of the US Capitol building in Washington DC.

For this production, what director-adapters Bill Rauch and Shishir Kurup had in mind was an environmental event which would not merely be situated in a shopping mall, but would literally be about it. Managing somehow to convince the management of the Santa Monica Place Mall that this was a good idea for all concerned, Rauch and Kurup planned a production that would take place during normal evening shopping hours, and enlist an audience in a pilgrimage through the halls and corridors, utilizing the gleaming shops and alluring show windows as emblematic set pieces. The creative forces were similarly

site-specific:

The play began with the semblance of a conventional theatre event, a vacant storefront into which an audience filed to sit on folding chairs in neat rows, facing a podium. But a prominent sign "1994 Gods and Goddesses Convention" and the sight of oddly-costumed ushers (who turned out to be African, Hindu, Ancient Greek, Hebrew and Muslim Gods/Prophets) made it clear that something peculiar was going on — though certainly not Everyman. After some jollity and the awarding of door prizes, however, the assembled divine figures turned menacing, leveling a collective accusation: "We perceive…How that all creatures...living without dread in worldly prosperity...in worldly riches is all their mind..." The old phrases had a newly familiar ring in the context of a shopping mall, as did the promise of calling us to a "reckoning of everyman’s person." And before we in the audience could laugh the comparisons off, we were ambushed from behind. Death appeared in a cloud of stage smoke, a shadowy female figure beckoning to us. "Please follow Death into the mall," explained one of the divine ushers matter-of-factly, and obediently we did so.

The trail led initially behind the scenes of the mall, so to speak; down dark narrow service corridors where, with amplified Soul music, impromptu audience interviews ("Where are you from? Beverly Hills? Terrific!) and a sing-along, we were bonded into a group. Emerging from the darkness into the glittering arcade of the mall again, with its vapid elevator music and visions of passing shoppers and escalators, we recognized it as a palpable illusion. There, in a huge quadrangular stairwell of balconies, the drama began to unfold. Everyman emerged in the first instance as a male executive-type in shirt and tie, at the window of a glass elevator car. Using a body mike to project her words (a technical provision which enabled actors to communicate from great distances away) Death dropped a lengthy list of Everyman’s misdeeds to flutter down to the courtyard below, making it clear that she "set not by gold, silver nor riches,/ nor by Popes, Presidents, Movie Stars nor Princesses."

The blend of authentic text and modern interpolations was characteristic of the production, as was a transformational acting style. Death multiplied into two, three or four simultaneous deaths, speaking in unison and unfurling a huge red cloth from the highest balcony that draped down three floors, like a blazon of accusation or a red carpet pathway to disaster. And when we looked back, Everyman had been transformed into a suburban woman in a hat, making her way through the audience looking for her friend Fellowship.

After speaking on mobile phones, from separate floors, the friends met up in front of a jewelry store — a real jewelry store. The cinematic realism of such moments was achieved with no expense to the set design budget, thanks to the imaginative notion of setting the play in a mall in the first place. The episode of Kindred and Cousin was played for laughs nearby, with the simple but brilliant expedient of casting them as a comedy team in bowler hats descending (but never quite arriving at the bottom of) an ascending escalator, as a frustrated Everyman, once more a male, and in Bermuda Shorts, waited for them below.

Moved on by efficient ushers with headsets, we followed Everyman once more, past potted palms and floor map directories, in search of (what else, in this context?) Goods! When we found her, she was a mannequin behind glass in a store window, with a green bouffant wig. Coming to life, she carried out her seduction of Everyman from behind glass, embodying the vicarious eroticism of window-shopping, before rejecting him and turning back into a mannequin.

And so it went, with Good Deeds a casualty in a hospital gown, hooked up to an ICU, and Knowledge, Confession and Penance the custodial staff (a conceit I found either condescending or unintelligible), as Everyman turned back into a female again. Demonstrating her change of heart by giving her shopping purchases away to passers by, she was rewarded by the arrival of Strength (a muscle man from the local health club), Beauty (a beautician) and Discretion ( doctor), like the winner of a TV game show. As inspirational "Star Wars" music echoed through the mall, a happy ending in the best Hollywood style seemed at hand.

But then, as a grave site on the ground floor came into view, these prizes faded away, until only Good Deeds (off the ICU and restored to health) still stood beside her. Everyman’s death — certainly the most harrowing I have ever seen in an Everyman production— was staged with frightening realism as a massive heart attack, complete with agonizing pain and a team of paramedics administering shock therapy. It was almost as if we had encountered, in the midst of our shopping, one of those disconcerting moments of reality — a fall, an injury, an actual heart attack— that sometimes intrude on our pursuit of happiness. The ending was somber, with the grave covered by the red cloth and the final words spoken by the medical attendants, after their attempts at resuscitation had failed; no angelic apotheosis, and the final phrase "That is Everyman in the Mall," as the elevator music played on and curious shoppers turned to seek the reason for all the applause.

Everyman in the Mall received sufficient critical praise and audience enthusiasm to justify two revivals, in 1997 and again in 1998, at four different malls in the Los Angeles area. The production is well documented in a video put together by Cornerstone, pending the actors’ arrival in the mall, centrum, centre ville, High Street, Strøget or Ginza nearest you.

The burden of my paper, which I hope will be evident implicitly in the description of these markedly different but strikingly successful revivals, is that Everyman is alive and well as we enter the twenty-first century, five hundred years after its first creation and one hundred years on from Poel’s resurrection of the text as a stage classic. The world has changed immeasurably in those one hundred years, but the human condition of course has not. We humans are born, live for a while with the realities and illusions of our existence, and then —without exception— we die. It was the genius of the author of Everyman (or more precisely the genius of his progenitor, the author of Elckerlijc) to raise the perennial question of mortality with such philosophical boldness and provocative theatricality.

Like any great play, Everyman survives because it cannot be confined to the moment or purposes of its inception. With that magisterial and protean ability to renew itself and embody new meanings in fresh contexts, and yet remain unbounded by any simple analysis, Everyman announces itself, like Hamlet, Tartuffe or Faust, as permanently true, inexplicably timely, and immortal.

Robert Potter

University of California

Santa Barbara

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