You’re six years old. Mum’s in hospital. Dad says she’s “done something stupid.” She finds it hard to be happy.
So you start to make a list of everything that’s brilliant about the world. Everything that’s worth living for: 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.
You leave it on her pillow. You know she’s read it because she’s corrected your spelling. Soon, the list will take on a life of its own.
That’s the premise of British playwright and director Duncan Macmillan’s play Every Brilliant Thing.
Macmillan has been quoted as saying he wanted to find a way to communicate to those dealing with mental illness that "you’re not alone, you’re not weird, you will get through it, and you’ve just got to hold on.
“That’s a very uncool, unfashionable thing for someone to say, but I really mean it. I didn’t see anyone discussing suicidal depression in a useful or interesting or accurate way.”
The one-actor show has been performed around the world since its 2011 debut, and was also adapted as a movie by Netflix in 2016.
Now the production is coming to Sudbury’s YES Theatre, performed by the company’s artistic director, Alessandro Costantini, and directed by Jeannette Lambermont-Morey.
Costantini said he came across the show by accident last year, when a friend asked him to audition for the role in her company’s version.
Unable to make the time commitment to another company, Costantini nonetheless fell in love with the script, and decided he’d like to perform it for YES Theatre.
The show’s run began at the Refettorio outdoor theatre on Durham Street Sept. 11, and continues through until Sept. 22.
“Out of all the things I've ever tackled as an actor, it is the thing that most closely aligns to my spirit and my ideology and my view of life,” said Costantini.
Every Brilliant Thing hinges on audience participation.
Each audience member is handed a piece of paper with one thing that’s brilliant about the world. Throughout the play, Costantini, whose character ages from a little boy to a grown man in his thirties, calls out numbers, asking people to read the piece of paper in their hands.
A “gentle meditation on what makes life gorgeous,” he said the show is more of a “conversation between the actor and the audience about this list.”
Tackling themes of mental health, YES Theatre’s Sept. 10 preview performance of Every Brilliant Thing was held, unintentionally, on World Suicide Prevention Day.
“‘Every Brilliant Thing’ gently nudges us to zoom out of those dark moments, and look for ways in which we can grapple and cope,” said Costantini. “It is a piece about community, it is a piece about sharing, about conversation, and I know that people leave feeling completely uplifted.”
Although he’s obviously busy with the day-to-day responsibilities of running a theatre company,
Costantini said he wants to keep his hand in acting.
“I'm really trying to be specific about what pieces I'm performing in and what pieces I'm directing or just producing,” he said. “Being an actor is such a huge part of my identity as an artist, and I do want to ensure that I'm able to maintain that, and I love performing for this community,”
For the director’s job, Costantini tapped his former George Brown College theatre school professor Jeannette Lambermont-Morey, an eminent director who has worked for the likes of the Julliard School and the Stratford Festival.
The split rehearsals into two sections — a couple of weeks back in the spring and then more intensively starting three weeks ago.
“I knew that she would be able to push me to new limits, and that she has done,” Costantini said.
When she was approached by Costantini for the job, Lambermont-Morey said she’d already seen Every Brilliant Thing performed once before, and she immediately thought it was the perfect role for him.
“It is centred in someone who's comfortable with people, who is communicating something that's very personal to them, and that's something that [Costantini] does really well in his real life,” Costantini said.
“So I thought that would be a good fit with this character in this play. The objective is for the performance to seem like it is not a performance, for it to feel like the character is just standing there and talking, right? And that's something that [Costantini] has mastered.”
While the show is set to take place at the outdoor Refettorio theatre, because there’s currently no production happening at Sudbury Theatre Centre, the STC’s lobby is the secondary location in case of inclement weather.
You can purchase tickets online here.
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.