Every Brilliant Thing at Boise Contemporary Theater

Or: Lifeline

“The list started after her first attempt.” Our narrator (Christian Libonati) recounts how, at seven years of age, he was picked up by his father, late, from school and driven to the hospital with the news that his mother had, “done something stupid.” At a loss as to why why his mother would want to do something stupid, the child began to compose a list of “Every Brilliant Thing,” joys that aren’t worth leaving behind.

Lit by the houselights, drawn into a circle by director Julie Ritchey into a brief but heartfelt community, Duncan Macmillan’s play for one actor and two hundred scene partners flourishes a story of love and life. Upon entering the space Libonati, with the warm, low-humming energy of a parish priest or a well-trained Labrador, will hand you a fragment from the list: a number and one surprising thing to delight in. No One Is Safe From Audience Participation! But those afflicted with stage fright need not flee. Macmillan has woven the strands of his play to touch on every heart without constricting those who come to see it. It’s your two cents of time that helps to sweeten the pot.

Not to say that this is an easy job, even with Macmillan’s surprising, mischievous script. It would be very easy to sink into paranoia, gazing at one’s fellows, wondering if any are plants, anxious to see if and when you’ll be called to duty, worried that someone will flub their moment. We are used to going to the theater to lose ourselves, not find two hundred compatriots.

But Libonati keeps the turntable spinning; gliding in between the rows with a lively deftness, taking time to tell the story to each of us, indulging in gentle mischieviance, and with a thrilled eagerness in discovering what surprising props he can drum up from his audience. He takes great joy in sharing (not using) a moment with individuals, dressing a woman up as Mrs. Patterson, an inventive school councilor, or solicitously breaking up a couple (taking care to seat and comfort the jilted member) so he can have the remainder play the narrator’s beloved Sam (a splendidly written role.)

But it’s not all joys and joshing. A first attempt always implies a second, and a third, and more. The eponymous list might have been lovely work of naive exuberance turned to mature reflection and joy, delighting many; but it failed to reach its target audience, either of them. Our hero, well versed in the science of death and the psychology of suffering, feels his own black dog padding at his heels, nosing at his belly, ripping at his heart. Libonati, in a highly nuanced performance, shows an undemonstrated, unindulged anger; something enormous buried in a river of ice. Talking the way suicide is sensationalized and romanticized, how it becomes contagious, twining around his mother’s silence, and the dimming of his own world, Libonati’s voice goes very quiet, his mouth presses together, and his breath that could once fill up an entire theater comes shallow and slow, as though every alveoli in his lungs had turned to knife-edged glass.

“Here’s some advice, for anyone who has considered suicide.” He says at one point, eyes hard and shining, “Don’t.”

This is hard-edged stuff, and Ritchey and the theater have partnered with the Idaho Suicide Prevention Hotline, who’s staff wait in the lobby throughout the show in case of need or question (you can even go back into the theater if you’ve excused yourself, there is no stigma here.) But cutting as it may be the play and the list are celebrations of life; finding the shining facets of time spent with loved ones, dogs, music, literature and the sheer unbelievably beautiful things like badgers that make life worth sticking around for. The list, as we see it, is a chain, formed link by link, added to by many hands, raised by many voices (in a brief but heartfelt community-in-the-round, under the houselights), and unlike a chain that entangles and binds, it is forged in Libonati’s hands and passes out to each of us to marvel at. And maybe it will stretch far out into somebody who we would never guess needed it, hurried so far inside they would believe themselves to be unreachable, and offer them a chance to pull themselves out.

(A personal note. When I left home my father and mother made a pact with me. Each evening, no matter how late it was or tired we were, we would send each other three gratitudes. Ofttimes just a short email entitled “Day,” with a list: G1, G2, G3. It’s hard to be original and mostly I touch on obvious things, something no canny playwright could set in the firmament of his list. There are times when the curser blinks empty a long time beyond G1. But we always hammer it out in the end. And it helps. It really does.)