Review: EVERY BRILLIANT THING at Center Repertory Company

Individual thoughts, moments and actions help define the lead characters evolving and ever-growing list in this poignant and uplifting one man performance piece starring  William Thomas Hodgson with direction by award-winning Jeffrey Lo (Vietgone, Chinglish, The Great Leap). Struggling with a suicidal mother and stoic father,  the Narrator creates his list as a method of communicating with his mother, a woman who feels she has no reasons to live. How does a seven year old deal with such monumental emotions? His naïve happiness crushed by the guilt of having failed in some way and unable to solve his mother’s  ill ease.

Hodgson prefaces the play with an admonition that the material hits close to home, and anybody who has been touched by suicide will be moved by his authentic and heartfelt delivery. As he matures, he finds romance and joy, sharing his expanding list with someone who gets the beauty of life. But depression creeps in, perhaps motivated by the fear of following in his mother’s footsteps. The list stalls, his marriage dissolves, his mother dies after her third attempt. Playwrights Macmillan and Donahoe clearly have a message here; including a monologue on ‘social contagions’ based on the 1774 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. The young protagonist commits suicide which caused a wave of suicides causing the book to be banned. Attitudes, beliefs and behaviors have been proven to spread through populations like an infectious  contagion. The Samaritan’s guidelines on reporting suicides  is mentioned as research shows “certain types of media depictions, such as explicitly describing a method , sensational and excessive reporting , can lead to imitational suicidal behavior among vulnerable people.”

Every Brilliant Thing’s serious nature is cleverly balanced both by Hodgson’s reaching out for support, surviving, and thriving as well as a cute use of audience participation throughout the piece.  We’re provided pieces of paper with numbered phrases which correspond to items on the list that we get to shout out when your number is called. As well, a few audience members become characters in the story (the Narrator’s father and his girlfriend and future wife Sam). I usually cringe at audience participation, but it works well here and Hodgson knows how to work the crowd without losing control of the story. It’s a winning performance that rides the range of emotions of despair, grief, hope and joy.

Every Brilliant Thing continues through January 26th. For more information, please visit lesherartscenter.org or call the box office at (925) 943-7469.

Photo Credit: Alessandra Mello