Everybody
Adaptation History

Unsurprisingly, Everybody wasn’t born from thin air, but neither was the work from which it was most closely adapted, the 15th-century Everyman. In actuality, the heart of the text can be traced all the way back to prehistory, namely to early Indian Buddhism.

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Buddhists, who seek transcendence from the single self and the eventual attainment of nirvana (which the Western world might call enlightenment), largely follow the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the original Buddha, who lived upwards of 2,400 years ago. These lessons, like any religion, take the form of fables and stories from the lives of their founders. However, as our production emphasizes, nothing in our world is exempt from the influence of ourselves and each other, and thus the fables of the Buddha’s life have been constantly retold, refashioned, and altered; of the many versions of the Buddhist legend, we can now identify the tale of saint Josaphat as a Christian retelling of the Buddha’s own life and teachings. The common story of Josaphat, similar to its Buddhist origin, warns against the “false friends” of wealth and earthly connections, and exalts good deeds (and, of course, the Christian faith) above all else. This is the form the Buddhist parable took when it eventually reached Western Europe, and more specifically, the Dutch Low Country, where it inspired Peter van Diest’s Elckerlijc in the 15th-century. This text was part of a growing tradition of Dutch scholarship in the dramatic arts and may have stood as an early attempt at public relations.