KCAT’s Everybody dissects the human condition via lottery draw and the universe’s gaping maw

Photo by Brandon Parigo

KC’s theater scene is, increasingly, picking a fight with my mental health. Unicorn, KCAT, KCRep, and Melting Pot—just all putting me through the wringer lately. It feels targeted, as if a schedule set in place a year ago was somehow finely tuned to my personal neurosis; delicately calibrated to hit my flashing weak spot with a direct hit in whichever genre of emotional turmoil I’m waging war against at that moment. The less paranoid reading is surely that an entire medium is not ‘out to get me’ but rather that I am coming unraveled at a rate my therapist cannot possibly match pace against. That’s all by way of saying that if you’re experiencing any form of existential dread, KCAT’s production of Everybody is not going to save you. [Complimentary.]

Directed by Vanessa Severo from a script by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Everybody is a meta-meta-post-meta comedy about the human condition, pulled from the shifting perspective of said problem across centuries, and framed within the novelty of a game of chance. It’s a delightful production built atop horrifying honesty, where a brief recess from the containment of existence plays out under the looming spectre of our eventual undoing. Fun for the whole family!

Photo by Brandon Parigo

Taken as a loose adaptation of a 15th-century morality play, Everyman, the morality here is stripped back to shift focus toward a more modern self-spiral: a mortality play. A diety in narrator form (John Rensenhouse) summons Death (Cinnamon Schultz) to confront a single Main Character with the end of their life, and a transition into the great unknown of the beyond—no longer based in the hellfire or heaven of old.

The major destinations here matter much less than the specifics of a human’s weight and worth, which is afforded a brief opportunity to choose what they will “take with them” into the hereafter.

At each evening’s production of Everyone, the entire cast pulls from a lottery on stage, and their draw dictates which character they’ll be playing that night—one as the Main Character, and the rest as heightened personifications of the best and worst of ‘man’s’ relationships to the world and to themselves. This structure means that all actors from the central cast must have prepared for all roles, and are ready to stage them with one of more than a hundred possible combinations of their fellow players.

You can see where, especially with the overwhelming amount of material given to the Main Character, that a production could wind up drawing a ‘fine’ arrangement—especially from the slightly uneven writing around two of the secondary adventures.

Fortunately for this staging, there is simply a murder’s row of local talent as the chorus pool: Elaine Clifford, R.H. Wilhoit, Julie Shaw, Mateo Moreno, and Dri Hernaez—all known top-shelf quantities. [Teisha M. Bankston is also excellent to see here in a supporting role, alongside an alternation of Edelweiss Etherton/Bellamy Kelly in a surprise role.]

Photo by Brandon Parigo

With those involved, this is one of those times I wish my dance card could free up on a moment’s notice, because I would’ve loved to have caught another round (and another rotation) of the cast the next night. Some high philosophy with difficult pills to swallow gets hidden in the visible delight that the performers bring to the spontaneity of the evening’s RNG. It has the spirit of what I enjoy about improv comedy, without having to suffer all the ‘improv comedy’ parts.

Severo’s direction here continues a streak of grand slams across genres and masters the inverse/opposite of her Hellraiserian physicality puzzle box in last year’s Dracula adaptation. Here again, the staging, lighting (Zoe Spangler), and production/design (Kelli Harrod, Eric Palmquist, Daisy Melton, Matt Snellgrove, Tyler Lindquist) achieve a kind of elegance in form that impresses without distracting from utility as a tool for the cast. Everything here is in its right place to enable the story’s players to fully… play.

As much as Everyone punched me in the throat with big questions about my place in the universe (on a day I was particularly ill-equipped to handle any further personal introspection), I could still watch this team bring it to life every single night of the run? Not sure what higher praise to offer, especially with my limited time left on this plane. Go roll some spiritual dice with this one, while you can.

Everybody runs at City Stage in Union Station through March 22, 2026. Tickets are available here. 

Photo by Brandon Parigo