“Every Brilliant Thing” is not really a “play” in the conventional sense. Not even sure it’s a “show,” and the word “experience” is overused to describe everything from feeding your dog to paying bills.
Instead, maybe “Every Brilliant Thing” is more an “act” in the sense of a vaudeville act or, better, a magic act. Indeed, there’s a bit of alchemy in what happens in the production that is running on Riverside Theatre’s intimate Waxlax Stage through April 13.
However it’s labeled, it is an entertaining, moving, sad-yet-funny collaboration among its playwrights, a single performer, and his audience.
The list of the title begins when an unnamed main character, then 7 years old, jots down several of the world’s little pleasures that he hopes will persuade his mother that life is worth living when she is hospitalized after, as his father describes it, “doing something stupid.”
It begins with simple, childlike things like ice cream or roller coasters or wearing a cape. He revisits and adds to the list as his mother’s struggle with depression continues while he is in high school a decade later, and then continues into adulthood.
When his college girlfriend comes upon the list, folded and forgotten in the pages of a book he has loaned her, she adds several “brilliant things” of her own, which only makes him love her even more.
As the list gets shared more widely it ‘goes viral’ before that was even a thing, with people from all over adding their own ideas to the roster.
That the narrative deals with the effects of his mother’s manic depression, from his childhood until it threatens to occur in himself as an adult, could be dark and off-putting if not handled with such humor and grace.
Much of the credit for this goes to Jimmy Ray Bennett as the storyteller and ringmaster at the center of the action.
He adroitly covers the bases from a child confused by his mother’s depression, to a teenager angered by feelings of betrayal, a love-smitten college student and, finally, to an adult fearful of having inherited her disorder.
Just as crucial as his acting is the skill with which Bennett draws from audience members the improvisations that propel the story.
If the words “audience participation” fill you with dread, fear not. From the outset, he engages the audience so amiably and warmly that we trust that we’re in good hands and go along with his request: to read aloud from a slip of paper he hands to us as we take our seats, on which is handwritten one item from the list of every brilliant thing.
Most of the audience simply read their brilliant things when he calls its number – sometimes more than once over the 70-minute duration. But others become bona fide supporting characters: his father, a veterinarian, a kindly teacher, and his girlfriend-then-wife.
The matinee I attended was filled with an audience that did so fully and with such commitment that the result was enormously entertaining. Hats off to these folks, whose responses were so convincing and natural that it was hard to believe they were improvising on the spot.
In fact, it’s difficult to imagine a piece of theater that must vary so drastically from one performance to the next, dependent as it is on the audience being participants more than mere spectators.
With their active engagement being such a crucial part of the fun, it becomes like an intricate parlor game, everyone kept on their toes waiting for their number to be called. (Mine was “Films that are better than the books they’re adapted from.”)
As directed by Allen Cornell, the proceedings are presented in the round, with the audience on four sides looking down upon a central playing area. These multiple platforms let Bennett climb and roam as needed to interact with the patrons to whom he’s assigned the characters.
The script by Duncan Macmillan began its journey to the stage in the U.K. as a one-person play, first performed by a woman but deliberately written to be equally suited to an actor of any gender. Later, when British performer Jonny Donahoe took on the role, he collaborated with playwright Macmillan to introduce his gift for improvisation, the element that sets the production apart.
Even without the improv, it would remain a compelling and thoughtful account of the effects of parental depression and suicide on children. But there’s something marvelous and heartening about a roomful of different voices enumerating everyday pleasures, large and small. I think we can add “Strangers coming together to create art” to the list.
“Every Brilliant Thing” runs through April 13 at the Riverside Theatre, 3250 Riverside Park Dr., Vero Beach. Tickets are available online at RiversideTheatre.com or by calling the box office at 772-231-6990.
Photos provided
