Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper and an audience member (Photo by Zach Mendez)
Reviewed by Philip Brandes
Ensemble Theatre Company
Through June 21
RECOMMENDED
A solo performer. An empty stage configured in the round. A list of poignant, life-affirming thoughts written on individual slips of paper. The mission: enlist the usually passive onlookers in transforming an uncomfortably dark narrative about suicide and depression into a joyful, shared appreciation for all the reasons to keep going.
Admirable intentions notwithstanding, when it comes to shows as heavily dependent on audience participation as Every Brilliant Thing, allow me to introduce the nightmare scenario: me.
Full disclosure: I’m an unapologetic introvert. If there were an antisocial network I would join it, though on reflection I guess that would rather defeat the purpose. Still, the prospect of being singled out by a performer to be used for spectacle — all too often at the volunteer’s comic expense — conjures up something closer to becoming the mark for a Vegas magician’s lounge act than anything resembling an authentic theatre experience.
And yet…
Nicholas Moniardo-Cooper’s performance in Every Brilliant Thing for Santa Barbara’s Ensemble Theatre Company works a particular kind of magic all its own in dismantling the familiar anxiety-inducing audience participation formula favored by stage predators.
We all know the routine. Someone unlucky — or insufficiently guarded — gets hauled onstage for what is essentially a public transaction in which the volunteer’s dignity is the currency. What inevitably follows is an immersive ambush that must extract sufficient entertainment from discomfort before the volunteer is released to slink back into the anonymous safety of spectatorship.
In principle, this device is essentially detachable: strip it out or swap in a different routine and the show continues without a ripple. Which is precisely the difference that makes the approach of playwright Duncan Macmillan and originating performer Jonny Donahoe’s so uniquely essential: remove the audience participation from this play and you don’t have a lesser version of it. You have nothing at all.
So what does Macmillan and Donahoe’s approach actually look like? The play’s premise is deceptively simple, with Moniardo-Cooper playing an unnamed monologuist — let’s call him our Host — who cheerfully greets audience members as they arrive. The fourth wall, in other words, is demolished before he launches into his story about growing up with a mother whose recurring suicide attempts shadowed his childhood and adolescence. In this accomplished performance, Moniardo-Cooper’s welcoming warmth never wavers, even as the narrative navigates increasingly dark waters.
At 7 years old, in an instinctive act of love and helplessness, our Host began compiling, as a gift for his hospitalized mother, a list of everything about the world that, to a child , makes life worth living. Ice cream. Water fights. Staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV. The color yellow. Things with stripes.
The list items gain in complexity and nuance as our Host continues adding them amid pivotal events over the course of a lifetime. It therefore serves as the play’s engine, its emotional spine, and its central theatrical device. Even before the performance begins, our Host moves through the audience distributing slips of paper — each carrying a numbered entry from the list. Selected recipients are told that when their number is called, they should read their entry aloud. They don’t yet know what they’re holding, or why, or what story they’re about to become part of.
Where the traditional audience participation model ambushes, Every Brilliant Thing enrolls. As a group, we’re gently, consensually recruited into the story before it’s even begun. And when the numbers are called and the entries ring out from different parts of the theatre, the list becomes genuinely communal. More than a prop or a playwright’s conceit, it’s a living object that requires the audience’s voices to exist.
But the slip-of-paper mechanism is only the beginning. As his story unfolds, our Host recruits individual audience members to play key characters who populate his life — and this is where Every Brilliant Thing most radically departs from anything the conventional participation gimmick attempts.
The selections are not random. Since the start of his pre-show circulation, Moniardo-Cooper has been quietly casting the play — observing, assessing, making decisions as to who will be tapped to play our Host’s father, his veterinarian, his school counsellor, his university lecturer, and ultimately the romantic partner who will become the emotional center of his adult life. Our Host approaches each participant with the same disarming warmth he brings to his own persona, ensuring recruits are invited rather than conscripted.
What follows in every case is something that conventional audience participation almost never achieves: genuine intimacy. When a recruit playing the veterinarian is handed a pen representing a hypodermic needle and asked to euthanize a folded coat that has become, in our Host’s arms, a dying dog, I doubt anyone in the 294-seat New Vic theatre could fail to identify with the child’s confusion and sadness.
Among the most affecting of these recruited performances is a father-son car journey to the hospital after the mother’s first attempt at self-destruction. Our Host assumes the role of his own father — a man of few words in a crisis — and feeds the recruit a single devastating line to deliver. What precedes it is an extended sequence in which the recruit, playing our Host at age seven, responds to everything his “Dad” says with a single word: “Why?” The escalating simplicity of that exchange — Why are we going to the hospital? Why did she hurt herself? Why is she sad? — builds to questions no parent, and no play, can satisfactorily answer. The final blow comes with the revelation that this conversation is just the imagined one our Host would like to remember. In reality, after the father’s initial declaration that “Your mother’s done something stupid,” they sat in silence for the rest of the ride. It’s probably the most quietly shattering two minutes in the production.
In each interactive scene, Moniardo-Cooper impressively calibrates his instructions and interaction to the recruit in front of him, adapting to their level of confidence, their humor, and their hesitance to ensure each is given only as much to do as they can comfortably manage. The result plays more as natural conversation than performance.
The most sustained and affecting of these relationships is with Sam, the college library stranger who becomes our Host’s great love. An audience member is quietly designated early in the performance and carries the emotional weight of the relationship through its most intimate moments — including, eventually, a marriage proposal the recruit delivers on one knee in the middle of the performance space. By that point the boundary between audience member and character has dissolved so gradually that the moment lands with genuine feeling.
Consider what the audience has actually done by the end of the performance. They have voiced the list — given it sound and presence in the room. They have portrayed the people our Host loved and lost and found again. They have asked the unanswerable questions and sat with the silence that follows.
What makes Every Brilliant Thing so structurally accomplished is not simply that its audience participation model is more humane and engaging than the conventional one — it’s that the participation itself becomes the principal argument. The play’s central claim is that staying alive requires noticing what makes life worth living, and that this cannot be, in the end, a solitary act. We in the audience have, without quite realizing it, become the community the play argues we cannot do without. The list of brilliant things only saves us from despair if others around us hold pieces of it.
To achieve the play’s requisite intimacy despite the venue’s larger seating capacity, director Jenny Sullivan and scenic designer Fred Kinney reconfigured the New Vic’s proscenium by relocating the first few rows of house seating onto the extended stage to form a three-sided performance rectangle, with the remaining house seating serving as its fourth side.
For this particular introvert, seated in the front row but mercifully not among those selected for a named role, the experience disarmed my deep-seated preconceptions. From that vantage point I could observe the recruited participants up close: their initial hesitance, the moment they stopped performing and simply responded, the quiet surprise on their faces when they realized they had been part of something rather than subjected to it.
My own participation was limited to the call-and-response exchanges shared by the whole house — numbers called, entries shouted back, the list built collectively entry by entry. It was, it turns out, more than enough to evoke a personal connection to our Host’s caution that “If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.”
Such is the particular kind of spell that Every Brilliant Thing casts. It doesn’t just tell us that other people are essential to our survival. It enlists us in proving it.
New Vic Theatre, 33 W. Victoria St., Santa Barbara; Thurs., 7:30 pm, Fri., 8 pm, Sat., 3 pm, Sun., 2 pm; thru June 21. www.etcsb.org Running time: One hour and 15 minutes with no intermission.
