By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Kendra Beitzel is alone on stage as “Every Brilliant Thing” starts.
Her character is in many ways alone in her troubled life as the daughter of a chronically depressed mother. Beitzel relates the tale in an engaging tone that’s at once self-knowing and wryly objective.
But Beitzel needs help telling her story. It is a monologue that sometimes needs other bodies to fill out the story, so she will draw random audience members to stand in for her psychologist, her boyfriend, her father, even herself.
Her character as well discovers over the course of her life that she needs help to cope with what life has handed her.
Broken Spectacle Productions will present “Every Brilliant Thing” Wednesday, May 3 through Friday, May 5, at 7:30 each night at Grumpy Dave’s, 104 S. Main St., Bowling Green. Tickets are $12 from http://www.brokenspectacle.com/. There’s also a one drink minimum.
The audience participation is part of what attracted director Sara Chambers to the script. “Because the audience itself becomes a character,” Chambers said, “the implication is we’re part of a human community, and that’s part of what makes life good.”
The play deals with “hard-wired depression,” yet “it is so hopeful.”
“The show is not saying in any way you can choose not to be depressed,” Chambers said.
Still there are choices. “I can still get help,” Chambers said. “I can continue to make choices about how I view the world. Things can get better, not always brilliant, but they can get better.
“I think it’s important to talk about things that are really hopeful about the sadness and the joy of moving through life.”
“Every Brilliant Thing” shows how difficult that can be through the lens of the one character. The playwright Duncan MacMillan, who with Jonny Donahue adapted it from his own short story, doesn’t designate an age or gender for the character. The role has been assumed by a variety of actors because depression afflicts a variety of people.
Chambers said she approached Beitzel because she wanted to work with her one more time before the actress delivers her baby – she’s eight months pregnant – and moves to Cincinnati. She felt a woman near to giving birth added resonance to the role.
Beitzel worked in three other shows staged by Broken Spectacle, the theater company founded by Chambers and her husband Jonathan Chambers, to present new work in unusual venues. And she was excited to do one more show.
“They understand the script so completely, it makes me as a performer want to match that,” she said of the Sara and Jonathan Chambers.
Her character, she said, “is someone whose mother has dealt with depression her entire life and she’s dealing with this while simultaneously trying to find her own happiness.”
At age 7, when her mother makes her first attempt at suicide, the character decides as a way to cheer up her mother write a list of all the brilliant things in life.
That list included staying up past bedtime to watch TV and “peeing in the pool and nobody knows.”
She made this list of 1,000 things, and left it for her mother.
Her mother never said anything, “but I know she read it because she corrected my spelling.”
Later she observes: “The idea that a list could combat hard-wired depression was hopelessly naïve.”
Still the list runs through the story. It is neglected, then taken up again, discarded. She lets others add to it. The list is her lifeline.
Prominent among the items are musical experiences. Her parents love music. They sing as a family around the piano in the kitchen. When her father retreats to his office she can tell what mood he’s in by the music he plays. If it’s avant garde jazz, don’t go in. No matter what his mood, he had impeccably good taste.
The musical bits along with the way, and the observational humor leaven this play. At times it seems as much a stand-up act as a drama. Still at times it’s heartbreaking, yet never maudlin.
Seeing such high quality theater in bar certainly makes my list of brilliant things.
