Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Director Lila Neugebauer

First and foremost, I absolutely enjoyed the play Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and directed by Lila Neugebauer. I think the characters of Everybody sitting amongst the audience, and the lottery of who gets to be the lead is incredibly exciting to watch. The story of the play itself was interesting and thought provoking. The transition from the play to the dream monologue in the dark was effective in way that put me in the play itself. I felt as if, I was also a part of this play. That I was Everybody.

The Cast of Everybody and Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Director Lila Neugebauer.

In a sense, I think everyone can somehow relate to the play. The ideas of love, friendship, kinship, morality, and material desires and so on are all the things we can make connections to. Therefore, throughout the play, I was constantly relating it to my own life or knowledge and beliefs about death. The play puts into perspective that death is unescapable and unavoidable. Death will come at any given time or place. In the play, it was the job of Death (played by Marylouise Burke) to bring everybody to the other side, or what we call in Tibetan Buddhism, The In Between. I was able to make several connections between the play Everybody and Death in Tibetan Buddhism.

During the play, when the two giant skeletons came out, it reminded me of the two dancing skeletons in Tibetan Cham which is a sacred Tibetan Buddhism dance, often performed during festivals. I have seen this dance when I was younger in my Tibetan settlement village in India outside the monastery a couple of times. The two skeletons in the Tibetan Cham Dance are sort of like the minions of the lord of Death called Yama. The two dancing skeletons in Tibetan Buddhism are called the lords of the cemetery.

Here is a depiction of The Dancing Skeletons/Lords of the Cemetery in Tibetan Thangka Painting Form

What I took from the play was that you cannot take material desires, and other external things in our lives with us when we die. The only things that are possible for you to take with you when you die are, certain intangible things. Although Everybody, who was played by Lakisha Michelle May in our version of the play, wasn’t able to take her mind and understanding with her which are indeed intangible, what she was able to take was love and unexpectedly, negative deeds she had done in her life. In Tibetan Buddhism, I learned repeatedly that when you die, the only things you can take with you are the things you have done good which corresponds with love, and bad deeds. So when confronted by Yama (Lord of Death), you will be summoned based on the good and bad you have done, and what shall be done to you. What I believe is that around the end of the play when the evil things of Everybody suddenly rushed in and went with her, death will decide on the other side what shall happen to Everybody by weighing the Good/Love and the Bad.

Actors Lakisha Michelle May and Christ Perfetti in Everybody. Picture: The New York Times.

I am certain that there are more connections between the Play Everybody and Death in Tibetan Buddhism. If you’d like to know more, I recommend reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, known as the Bardo Thodol in Tibetan (specifically translated by Robert A.F. Thurman) to learn in depth about liberation based on death. The book is not only about religion but includes teachings in philosophy as well as about how to overcome death because death should not be feared as it will come for everyone someday.