If I, like the lead in Every Brilliant Thing, were to write a list of all the small things that make life wonderful, seeing this play would be one of them.

My first time in attendance at Market Hall was surely a night to remember. The merry bustling of theatre patrons in the lobby, holding pamphlets in one hand and a pre-show drink in the other, hanging up their coats and scarves before heading in to find a seat for the show, was a liminal scene of local nightlife that often goes unnoticed. These moments of liveliness witnessed with a view of the wintery downtown from the foyer windows makes one wonder if the passersby below have any idea of the changes an audience is about to go through as we sit down for a play that will shake our settled worldviews and have us leaving later that night with a new sense of hope and possibility.

Please note, there will be spoilers ahead. But please don’t be discouraged, as the soul of Every Brilliant Thing is not the plot, however marvellous and magical it may be. It is rather every unique iteration of it shaped by the participation of each particular audience watching, and further, even acting. Moreover, please note that Every Brilliant Thing and this article do involve the topic of suicide.

Every Brilliant Thing is a play following a boy’s journey through life as he writes a list of, as the title suggests, every brilliant thing in the world, everything that makes life worth living. From the lists’ inception on the eve of his mother’s first attempt to take her life, through the development of his own depression, and following his marriage and subsequent divorce from his first love, we watch as at age seven and seventeen, at university, and in middle-age, the list provides a different role in his life, and becomes a part of ours.

There is no other indication that the play is to begin, no dimming lights or pre-show announcements, just Steve Ross’ casual command of the floor bursting into life. The still-hustling audience hushes, enthralled by the first notes of his opening monologue, unaware of just how unorthodox this drama is to become. Ross quickly breaks from his captivating performance to pluck out, no less charismatically, a member of the audience to take on the role of his character’s father. The play is expertly written so even the shyest can execute a stellar show, but most of the audience randomly selected to become a part of the play, no doubt influenced by Ross’s enthusiasm, emerges from their shell to perform their role, whether father, child counsellor, love interest, or college professor with gusto. Throughout the show, Ross calls numbers on the list out and audience members read out the brilliant thing written on the note they were entrusted with before the play began. The show becomes a mesmerizing dance, with Ross weaving between the audience at one point, doling out high fives in the triumphant climax of the love story, people answering the call of their number with ever-increasing vigour, and impromptu actors taking bolder creative liberties with their roles. A collectivity emerges, a sense of camaraderie and companionship between once isolated patrons attending a play at the same time, now committed to participation, unified in their enjoyment of this novel form.

When the play ends and Ross takes a well-deserved bow, the audience is invited to further participate by engaging Ross in a Q&A period about his experience performing this play and writing our own additions to the play’s list of “brilliant things”. It is only later in the evening, long since the last line, that I realize everything in the plot went south. The unhappy ending with the character’s mother taking her life and him not yet reuniting with his lover should’ve struck me bleak, yet I left with an indomitable sense of hope. How?

Amid crises and chaos, it can be easy to let hope flutter like sand through our fingers, sifted by the innumerable injustices that plague the information cycle every day. Every Brilliant Thing fights back, calling upon gratitude and celebration of the casual magic of life that by no means resolves the oppression that weighs us down, but keeps us showing up to the fight sans burnout. It is the root of healing, and the glimmer at the end of the tunnel, the goal of the fight. The good life, Every Brilliant Thing claims, is the small life, the simple life, the mundane joys that you only remember when you’re a couple hundred thousand things in on a list and your gaze has to get more discrete, more detailed. 

Every Brilliant Thing is a play for our age: one that finds joy in the otherwise morose, community in the otherwise lonely, hope in the otherwise lost. It is a unique form of resistance to the suffocating helplessness one might feel if they take the state of the world at face value without belief in the brilliant, without faith in its company. To leave an audience with a renewed sense of optimism, even as the story ends on a sombre cadence, is an art, and one that Every Brilliant Thing pulls off with finesse.