THEATER REVIEW : Cornerstone Makes ‘Everyman’ a Ball at the Mall

How surprised shoppers at Santa Monica Place must be when Death chases Everyman in the shadows of Victoria’s Secret. It’s certainly not your typical day at the mall.

And yet what more fitting place to stage “Everyman,” the anonymous 15th-Century morality play and bane of English literature students everywhere, than in a temple to materialism? The text reminds us, after all, that “all earthly things are but vanity”--and that includes frilly lingerie.

The Santa Monica-based Cornerstone Theater Company has revived this creaky chestnut with a bold leap into environmental theater. In “Everyman in the Mall,” the troupe leads the audience past vending carts and through service corridors as the hapless Everyman journeys toward his spiritual reckoning. The result is some of the most engaging and visually exciting theater in town.

In truth, “Everyman” is no great shakes as a play. We read (and, on very rare occasions, perform) it less on account of its crude dramaturgy than its historic role as a bridge between medieval church performance and the secular theater of Shakespeare, Marlowe and others.

Yet directors Shishir Kurup and Bill Rauch have creatively employed the mall’s shops and public spaces to mine the essential drama out of the title character’s quest for redemption. While often adopting a tongue-in-cheek tone--and playfully updating and revising numerous passages--the production remains as true to the humanistic spirit of the text as its nameless author could have hoped.

The performance begins in a small second-level auditorium, where audience members and the multiethnic cast mingle in a make-believe “convention of gods and goddesses.” A door prize is awarded--a plastic canteen, on review night--just as Death (Page Leong) suddenly appears amid swirling fog in front of a toy store.

From there, the imaginations of Kurup, Rauch and company seldom flag. The six principal cast members rotate through the role of Everyman, who rushes to prepare for Death by consulting such trusted mall personages as Fellowship (here played by Ashby Semple as a rich mall shopper), and Goods (Leong, as a blond-wigged mannequin in a window display).

The sheer technical demands, including the use of follow-spots and wireless mikes in the cavernous spaces, are daunting. But the show saves its most impressive strokes for the mall’s familiar conveyances.

Death, astride a staircase landing, issues her initial warning to Everyman as he obliviously rushes into a glass elevator, clutching a shopping bag. Later, Everyman (Christopher Liam Moore) confronts Kindred and Cousin (Armando Molina and C.J. Jones, as cigar-puffing glad-handers) walking down the up escalator.

As Everyman ponders his fall from grace amid the trappings of consumerism, you begin to perceive a whole new dimension to the slogan “shop till you drop.”

* “Everyman in the Mall,” Santa Monica Place, Fourth Street and Broadway, Santa Monica. Thursdays-Saturdays, 9 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Oct. 9. $12. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.