By Adrienne Dawkins-Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Flexzone Life Magazine
While listening to the Keke Palmer podcast the week before, I learned Tracee Ellis Ross was debuting on Broadway in a one-woman show. I was already in California on business, so I booked a flight to New York to catch it before it closed on its final weekend, this time with my oldest daughter, and nothing else on the agenda.
The play, "Every Brilliant Thing," written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe and directed by Jeremy Herrin, is interactive. Before the show, select audience members are quietly given a number, and when Tracee Ellis Ross calls it out, that person shouts back whatever's written on their slip of paper. We were number 10,000.
The play follows a woman from age seven into adulthood, coping with her mother's depression and suicide attempts.
As a child, she starts a list of "brilliant things"... small, almost desperate proof that life is worth staying for. Ice cream. Really good oranges. The color yellow. I watched a father try to gently explain to his seven-year-old why they were driving to the hospital, and years later, that same father picking his now-teenage daughter up again, except this time she understood exactly what was happening, and she was furious. Nobody tells you that anger belongs in grief too.
She keeps building her list through college, where she falls for a boy in the library. One day she lends him a book, forgetting her list is tucked inside. When he returns it, she notices something new: his own handwriting, added to her list. I felt her mortification turn to something softer in real time, watching a stranger's handwriting turn a private, hidden thing into something someone else thought was worth adding to.
There's a scene where she describes her mother having a good day, and the whole audience stands and dances as a disco ball spins overhead. I was on my feet with everyone else, enjoying myself... then the music abruptly cuts. Just like that. We sat back down in silence. Why? Because she just demonstrated just as quickly her mother would feel high, she would then sink back into depression, and how little warning anyone gets. I wasn't expecting to cry in my seat, but I did.
I won't tell you how the play ends but I'll say this: if you ever have an opportunity to see it, do so. I found out weeks later that September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. I can't think of a more fitting way to have stumbled into it than watching a story that treats depression with so much honesty, without ever making it small.
Watching it, I found myself wanting to start my own list of brilliant things. Not because I need a written record of what to be grateful for, though I think that's a healthy habit for anyone. Simply because it feels good to not only see the beauty in life, but to honor it through acknowledgment. A few things I'll add to my list: soak-proof VIP entry right before a sudden downpour, the deep green and gold of the Hudson Theatre's lounge, my daughter nudging me to whisper that Oprah had just walked in, and getting to add my daughter's first Broadway show to my own list of brilliant things.