Enter the reignited Gillian Theatre at Writers Theatre in Glencoe and you’re met with a blazingly sunny light cue from the designer Jason Lynch, likely a stark contrast with the gloomy fall evening outside. The show “Every Brilliant Thing” can be set wherever a theater wants it to be set, and the director Kimberly Senior basically picked a North Shore backyard. Or so it feels, and this beautiful theater piece by Duncan Macmillan happens to be all about how everything feels.
The set designer Izumi Inaba has built a world of grass, patios and strings of lights, wooden fences and layers of decks suitable for grills. There, as if at a summer barbecue, you are warmly greeted by the actress Jessie Fisher and you get to pick your own spot: a regular theater seat, perhaps, or a bench, lounger or folding chair. Most likely you will have a small piece of paper thrust into your hand.
“Every Brilliant Thing” requires a great deal of gentle audience participation and, by that, I mean from most everyone. Fisher explains the setup. As a child, she had a mother who suffered from depression and attempted suicide on several occasions.
Since a young kid has trouble processing what all of that means and how to combat it, the unnamed character’s 7-year-old self decides to create a master list of all the reasons for living, some profound, most picayune. She begins with things that appeal to a young child (ice cream, water fights, staying up past your bedtime) and moves on more adult pl.
