Everybody

“But, um, it’s safe to say we’re dealing with some fairly old and ancient material, so maybe let’s trust it to be really wise and meaningful, okay?”

The Usher explains the original medieval play to the audience and suggests that the play bears wisdom because it is old. They say this with some irony: The Christian texts the play is based on have been used to tear apart civilizations.

“Now the original play, Everyman, purported to be about Life and its transience, which is to say it was really, I guess, about Death.”

During Everyman’s journey into death, he learns what is significant in life. In the end, the sins he committed don’t matter because he confesses, repents, and goes to heaven. Everybody doesn’t make that guarantee. Instead, the play suggests that audiences ought to remember that life is short, and no one can return to fix their mistakes, so we should try to love as much as possible and hurt as little as possible to maximize the time we have.

“Or, if that weirds you out, there’s also this Buddhist-ness at the heart of the material, which is just saying, like, ‘Hey, everybody, you know flowers? Like how they bloom in the spring and they’re so pretty when you’re looking at them and smelling them or whatever but, by winter, they’re dead and gone and you literally cannot recall anything specific about the specific flowers you just spent your whole spring smelling and looking at except for this vague memory of having smelled and looked at some flowers once, in general, maybe?”

The message and themes of the original play are decidedly Catholic. As the Usher universalizes the central idea into a message about morality that fits into religious and secular ideologies.