'Every Brilliant Thing' review: Uplifting show makes ideal use of its audience
“Every Brilliant Thing,” a one-person play written by Duncan Macmillan that has become among the most produced works in the country, is about the creation of a list.Our narrator, embodied in this classy, gently emotional Writers Theatre production by Jessie Fisher, tells the story of growing up with a suicidal mother. The play begins with the first such attempt when the narrator was 7 years old, picked up at school by her father and taken to the hospital, where she waited outside her mother’s room with some kind older people who gave her snacks.By the time she got home, she had started making a list for her mother of all the things to live for: ice cream, rollercoasters, things with stripes, even nice old people who don’t smell bad. She put the first version of it on her mother’s pillow, with the title “Every Brilliant Thing.” 'Every Brilliant Thing' When: Through Jan. 5Where: Writers Theater, 325 Tudor Court, GlencoeTickets: $70Info: writerstheatre.orgRunning time: 1 hours and 10 minutes with no intermission The list grows over time. Audience members, who are handed slips of paper before the show starts, call out each of the “brilliant” things based on numbers. Fisher will say, “No. 319,” and the audience member with that number reads out, “The even-numbered 'Star Trek' films.”Fisher recruits others to play small roles — her father, a school counselor, her first love — as her character grows from an innocent child to a teenager to an adult, returning to the list as events spur its reappearance.Theater involving audience participation is not … let’s say, on my personal list of brilliant things, but this work has special qualities, making it the best, least discomfiting, most effective of its kind. The participation remains highly structured and guided, sufficiently spread among the audience and throughout the story and, above all, artistic in its purpose.Usually, audience interactivity pulls you out of the story and makes everyone self-conscious. Not here. Take those moments out of this play and it becomes a mere monologue, compelling perhaps but also ordinary. As executed in “Every Brilliant Thing,” the participation imbues the work with its own unique, buoyantly humane theatrical voice.Of course, the success of that depends on the production and performance. Fortunately, there’s unusually broad liberty granted to theaters in casting and localizing the text for this show, which was written and originally performed by Brits, who use “brilliant” far more universally than we do. The flexibility allows for each production to find its own authenticity.You can catch the original narrator, comic Jonny Donahoe, on the HBO taping of the New York performance. He was so central to the show’s development that he has a co-writing credit, and he brought to his performance a genuine cheerfulness, a big sense of humor, mixed with an easygoing neutrality in his audience interactions.Fisher brings an equal friendliness but a different, certainly more feminine sensibility. A successful Broadway actor and longtime Chicago performer, Fisher emanates a tender compassion at every moment, which makes the audience comfortable and, interestingly, provides the educational elements of the text — how media ignores guidance on how to cover suicides — with a greater forcefulness.The original production started at a fringe festival and had no set to speak of, just a bare playing space with a small riser for Donahoe to sit on, surrounded by the audience.In Writers' intimate Gillian Theater, director Kimberly Senior has chosen an almost opposite direction. Izumi Inabi’s design uses the entire black box. There’s grass and a wood fence, patio tables and stringed-up lights, and risers made from deck-type lumber, as if Fisher is inviting us into her own backyard. But then above the audience on one side of the space, Inabi and lighting designer Jason Lynch have hung a slew of pendants and chandeliers, with a variety of shapes and colors, and scenes that are set inside the house use a record player and a piano.In a show where the house lights stay on the entire time, the expansive environment has an evocative every-space quality — public and private, exterior and mindfully interior at once.Over time, the list of brilliant things doesn’t just grow but shifts from being something intended to help the narrator’s mother to one that must help the narrator herself. The very act of making it, and continuing to add to it, becomes a conscious mental act of appreciating life even amid depression.“Every Brilliant Thing” is an upliftin
“Every Brilliant Thing,” a one-person play written by Duncan Macmillan that has become among the most produced works in the country, is about the creation of a list.
Our narrator, embodied in this classy, gently emotional Writers Theatre production by Jessie Fisher, tells the story of growing up with a suicidal mother. The play begins with the first such attempt when the narrator was 7 years old, picked up at school by her father and taken to the hospital, where she waited outside her mother’s room with some kind older people who gave her snacks.
By the time she got home, she had started making a list for her mother of all the things to live for: ice cream, rollercoasters, things with stripes, even nice old people who don’t smell bad. She put the first version of it on her mother’s pillow, with the title “Every Brilliant Thing.”
The list grows over time. Audience members, who are handed slips of paper before the show starts, call out each of the “brilliant” things based on numbers. Fisher will say, “No. 319,” and the audience member with that number reads out, “The even-numbered 'Star Trek' films.”
Fisher recruits others to play small roles — her father, a school counselor, her first love — as her character grows from an innocent child to a teenager to an adult, returning to the list as events spur its reappearance.
Theater involving audience participation is not … let’s say, on my personal list of brilliant things, but this work has special qualities, making it the best, least discomfiting, most effective of its kind. The participation remains highly structured and guided, sufficiently spread among the audience and throughout the story and, above all, artistic in its purpose.
Usually, audience interactivity pulls you out of the story and makes everyone self-conscious. Not here. Take those moments out of this play and it becomes a mere monologue, compelling perhaps but also ordinary. As executed in “Every Brilliant Thing,” the participation imbues the work with its own unique, buoyantly humane theatrical voice.
Of course, the success of that depends on the production and performance. Fortunately, there’s unusually broad liberty granted to theaters in casting and localizing the text for this show, which was written and originally performed by Brits, who use “brilliant” far more universally than we do. The flexibility allows for each production to find its own authenticity.
You can catch the original narrator, comic Jonny Donahoe, on the HBO taping of the New York performance. He was so central to the show’s development that he has a co-writing credit, and he brought to his performance a genuine cheerfulness, a big sense of humor, mixed with an easygoing neutrality in his audience interactions.
Fisher brings an equal friendliness but a different, certainly more feminine sensibility. A successful Broadway actor and longtime Chicago performer, Fisher emanates a tender compassion at every moment, which makes the audience comfortable and, interestingly, provides the educational elements of the text — how media ignores guidance on how to cover suicides — with a greater forcefulness.
The original production started at a fringe festival and had no set to speak of, just a bare playing space with a small riser for Donahoe to sit on, surrounded by the audience.
In Writers' intimate Gillian Theater, director Kimberly Senior has chosen an almost opposite direction. Izumi Inabi’s design uses the entire black box. There’s grass and a wood fence, patio tables and stringed-up lights, and risers made from deck-type lumber, as if Fisher is inviting us into her own backyard. But then above the audience on one side of the space, Inabi and lighting designer Jason Lynch have hung a slew of pendants and chandeliers, with a variety of shapes and colors, and scenes that are set inside the house use a record player and a piano.
In a show where the house lights stay on the entire time, the expansive environment has an evocative every-space quality — public and private, exterior and mindfully interior at once.
Over time, the list of brilliant things doesn’t just grow but shifts from being something intended to help the narrator’s mother to one that must help the narrator herself. The very act of making it, and continuing to add to it, becomes a conscious mental act of appreciating life even amid depression.
“Every Brilliant Thing” is an uplifting show about gratitude, played at just the right emotional register.
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