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by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, directed by Brendan Healy

Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

November 29-December 16, 2018

Dad: “Without imagination life would be unbearable”

Every Brilliant Thing is an unusual theatrical experience.  It’s a deeply personal narrative that is dependant on audience interaction to tell its story and to make its point.  British playwright Duncan Macmillan states that the sole role of the Narrator may be played by a man or a woman.  Canadian Stage has chosen Kristen Thomson as its Narrator, and after enjoying the warmth with which she tells the story and engages with the audience it is difficult to imagine anyone better suited for the role.

In the play from 2013 the Narrator gives a fairly generic account of growing up with a mother who is so clinically depressed she attempts suicide.  The Narrator recalls her reactions to her mother’s attempts when the Narrator was only seven years old, when she was in university and later after she has graduated.  The Narrator also chronicles her own falling in love at university, her wedding, her marriage and her breakup. 

All of this would not be particularly interesting except for one thing.  In reaction to the first suicide attempt the Narrator remembers, she decided to start of list of “every brilliant thing” in the world worth living for.  It starts out simply enough: “1. Ice cream, 2. Water fights, 3. Staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV, 4. The colour yellow, 5. Things with stripes”, etc. 

She gives the list to her mother hoping it will cheer her up.  Her mother corrects her spelling, but at least the Narrator knows she has read it.  The Narrator decides to continue the list up to 100 items, then to 1000.  Every significant event in the Narrator’s life is marked by the addition of more items until her goal expands to 10,000 items and then to one million.

Almost more than the Narrator’s life story, the play is about the growth of the list.  More than the Narrator’s telling of her own story,  the play is about the use of the audience in its telling.

Before the play begins, Thomson goes about the audience handing out coloured squares of paper, each with a number and a word or phrase.  As she tells the Narrator’s story and refers to items on her list, Thomson calls out the number and the holder of the matching piece of paper calls out what is written on it. 

Audience participation also includes audience members chosen on the spot to be actors.  One plays the vet who comes to the Narrator’s home to put down her dog.  Another plays her father who drives the Narrator to the hospital to visit her mother after her suicide attempt.  Another plays the therapist the Narrator is required to see after the attempt.  Another plays plays a university literature professor who teaches Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which the Narrator hates because it seems to glorify suicide.  (Indeed, the novel was a huge success and did provoke a rash of suicides in Europe.)  Most importantly, one audience member is chosen to play Sam, the Narrator’s boyfriend and later husband. 

Much of the play’s humour derives from seeing people who may have never acted in their lives suddenly finding themselves acting in a play at Canadian Stage.  The evening I attended, the actor Paolo Santalucia happened to be in the audience and Thomson chose him to play Sam.  Though more comfortable in front of an audience than others, even he had to listen carefully to Thomson for clues as to how his character should behave and what he should say. 

The obvious question is “Why does a play about coping with suicide require so much audience participation?”  The author of the text is listed as “Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe” because Macmillan consulted Donohoe, a British comedian famous for improv, for advice about how to integrate audience participation into his play. 

There are many answers to this question.  To begin with the numbered squares of paper, each person who calls out a “brilliant thing” at Thomson’s cue automatically becomes the holder and possessor of that brilliant thing.  In terms of the narrative they each add that brilliant thing to the Narrator’s list.  Thus, each person, contributes both dramatically and symbolically to making the Narrator’s life worth living.  Suicidal people are usually afflicted with a profound feeling of isolation and uselessness.  The play in its structure suggests that, in fact, we are all connected and useful and that the loss of even one individual affects the whole community.

A second answer to the question has to do with the use of audience members as actors.  As with the cued number holders, the audience member actors also represent the whole community in the theatre helping to tell the Narrator’s story.  Yet, they tap into an important additional element.  In the scene when the Narrator’s father drives her at age seven to visit her mother in hospital, her father tells her that “Without imagination life would be unbearable”.  The Narrator asks, “Why?” to which the father replies that imagination helps us think of a better future.  To the Narrator’s next “Why?”, he answers that imagining a better future gives us hope.  The use of audience members as actors is built on imagination – of the members themselves imagining themselves as characters and of the rest of the audience accepting their transformation into characters. 

The entire play is built on celebrating the imagination.  Macmillan specifies that the play is best presented in the round (as it is here) and with the lights up throughout (although director Brendan Healy can’t avoid giving Steve Lucas leave to make a few dramatic lighting cues).  Theoretically, such a situation without a set or costumes and with a constant view of the other audience members should make it more difficult for us to imagine the scenes the Narrator describes.  Yet, in spite of this, such is the power of storytelling that we see and feel what the Narrator suggests.  When the “vet” uses an ordinary pen to inject the coat that represents the Narrator’s dog with the drug that will kill it, we wince.

It helps immensely that Kristen Thomson is such a sympathetic Narrator. Her Narrator’s older self views with kindly irony the naïveté of her younger self and thus suggests that what we call our “self” is always a being in transition.  Thomson imbues the Narrator with a gentleness towards her past experiences as much as she demonstrates a gentleness towards all the audience members she calls on to participate.  If you wish to refuse, you can, but you also feel you don’t want to let her down.  Thomson chooses audience members and helps them give the best performance they can.  The atmosphere of community she creates is so warm and trusting that the glow from the uplifting experience of seeing the show outlasts the specific story the Narrator tells.

The Narrator tells us that with the help of friends, her list of brilliant things that make life worth living did grow to one million.  If we each had such a list, we could add to it seeing Every Brilliant Thing as item 1,000,001.                                     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Kristen Thomson as the Narrator; Kristen Thomson as the Narrator playing her Dad. ©2018 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.