Review of Every Brilliant Thing at New Jewish Theatre

    Every Brilliant Thing, currently at The New Jewish Theatre, is a coming-of-age solo play with many performers.

    As audience members enter the theatre, each is handed a small card with a word or brief phrase on it and a number between 1 and 1,000,000. During the course of the evening, The Player, as the program calls him, will from time to time call out a number, and the person holding the card with that number will read out the card. 

    In addition, The Player will, if less frequently, ask someone from the audience to join him to play a few moments with him. I noticed that the night I was there many of those called from the audience were people I have previously seen around St. Louis playing actual roles in actual productions. Coincidence? (They all acquitted themselves well.)

    Playwright Duncan Macmillan drew his play from his own life, shaping it through shorter pieces written for actors who asked him for monologues they could play. Eventually it was long enough for an evening in the theatre, and it was played by the Irish comedian Jonny Donahoe. As Donahoe performed it, he helped shape the play, and he now gets credit for a play written “with Jonny Donahoe.”

    The Player begins Macmillan and Donahoe’s story by telling us about the day when he was seven years old that his father picked him up from school and, instead of taking him home as he expected, took him to the hospital, where his mother was being treated. Suffering from severe depression, she had tried, unsuccessfully, to commit suicide, one of several times until, some years later, successfully. 

    The boy decided that he needed to find some way to cheer his mother up. That’s when he came up with the idea of the cards. He would write on each of them one of the “brilliant things” that make life worth living: “1. Ice cream. 2. Kung Fu movies. 3. Burning things. 4. Laughing so hard you shoot milk out your nose. 5. Construction cranes. 6. Me.” He leaves them on her pillow. She never mentions them, but you know she’s read them because she’s corrected your spelling. 

    So he keeps trying, and the now page-long lists take on a life of their own. Other people hear about them and make their own contributions, until eventually there are a million of them.

    In the meantime, The Player has grown up, gone to college, become a writer, gotten married, and had children. His mother has died, and later, his father, a rather withdrawn person with whom he has gotten closer. The lists have helped him with his own times of depression. They are markers of his life. Finding older ones filed away somewhere, they bring him back to himself, his family, his life.

    Every Brilliant Thing  has found a special following among organizations that deal with suicide, preventing it, surviving it, and being attached to someone who has attempted it or who has  succeeded. It is at times a very serious play. And at times a very funny one, as items on the cards can suggest.

    The Player must be able to move among these various emotions as he tells his story to the audience and maintains direct contact with them. It is not an easy thing to do, and you don’t have the support you get when other actors are with you. I have seen the play several times, and always The Player – sometimes a man, sometimes a woman – has achieved that level of performance.

    The New Jewish Theatre has made an especially fine choice for its Player. Will Bonfiglio embodies Warmth and Congeniality themselves as he circulates among the audience before the curtain rises, distributing his cards. And he never lets up. The theatre is arranged in a U shape, with the audience on three sides, and a two-step-high platform across the fourth side and an open space in the middle. So Bonfiglio is always either close to us on the playing space or among us in the audience. He is very careful to make his “volunteer” performers comfortable with him, improvising with them if that is where they are taking him. And he is always a fine actor, creating a part and playing it.    

    He does this with the help of “the woman behind the curtain,” the director, Ellie Schwetye. We in the audience can never know how much each of them contributed to their creation. We just get to enjoy it.

    Scenic and Lighting Designer Bess Moynihan wittily arranged more cards – many more cards — to dress her set, with hanging lights that surprised us by flashing very brightly on at just the right moment. Michele Friedman Siler designed the costumes (isn’t that what Will always wears?), director Schwetye designed the significantly remembered sounds, and Megan-Marie K. Cahill is the Stage Manager.

    Even for those of us who may not consider one-person narration real theatre, Every Brilliant Thing does get to you.

    —Bob Wilcox

    Photo by Jon Gitchoff