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Every Brilliant Thing

by Duncan MacMillan with Jonny Donahoe

producing artistic director’s notes by Emilia Sargent

We at the Tampa Repertory Theatre are thrilled to have you here with us to share the experience of Every Brilliant Thing. This production is the embodiment of our mission to create transformative, relevant, and compelling professional theatre that connects us through meaningful and inspiring shared experiences.

In Every Brilliant Thing, the narrator talks about his life and how he created a list of every brilliant thing that makes life worth living. He began at the age of seven when his mother attempted suicide. The play deals with depression and the difficult, vitally important subject of suicide in a sensitive and informative way. However, the play focuses on reminding us of the
infinite number of things we have to be grateful for and of the importance of hope in our darkest moments. The piece is funny, touching, and uplifting – we could use all these things.

Every Brilliant Thing continues our ‘Raise the Curtain on Mental Health Awareness’ initiative aimed at bringing together the power of live theatre storytelling and community resources to foster conversation, awareness, and stigma reduction around mental illness. We began this initiative last spring with a suite of offerings that culminated with our Theatre Tampa Bay award winning production of the groundbreaking, Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, Next to Normal. TampaRep has partnered with several organizations, including the Community Foundation Tampa Bay, Love IV Lawrence, Tampa Bay Thrives, NAMI Hillsborough, and the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay to bring awareness of mental health resources in our community.
We thank our partner organizations for the vital services that they provide and for valuing the importance of live theatre.

We have been able to accomplish some amazing things because of the generous support of our donors and sponsors – audience members from our community like you. We are so pleased to have the support of our Production Sponsor Brain & Behavior Research Foundation for supporting our ‘Raise the Curtain on Mental Health Awareness’ initiative and helping us to bring this beautiful play to life. We are immensely grateful to our season sponsors The Gobioff
Foundation and the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners, our Ticketing Sponsor Russell Buchan who helps us continue our Choose Your Price ticketing model, and our Opening Night Sponsors, Andrea Graham & Geoff Simon for their incredible support.

At TampaRep, we create an experience — one that the audience completes — in productions that are innovative, provocative, and classic.

Live theatre has the unique power to bring us together in a shared space to co-create stories uninterrupted from start to finish, each time to live just once in its exact iteration. There’s no pause button, no mute, no fast forward, and no going back. We lean forward and breathe together as the story unfolds, fully present together, through to the end. To me, it always feels
like a bit of magic. It is a magic that can only happen with you – our audience – to complete the experience. I hope you find Every Brilliant Thing to be as immersive, thought-provoking, heartening, and inspiring as I do – and that you leave feeling lighter and more hopeful.

I invite you to please lean in together to experience Every Brilliant Thing.

– Emilia Sargent, Producing Artistic Director/Director of Every Brilliant Thing

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Georgia Mallory Guy