'Every Brilliant Thing' explores a child's growing list of what makes life worth living

Ice cream, water fights, staying up past your bedtime, and being allowed to watch TV – these maybe just be a few of life’s beautiful treasures when you’re a kid. Horizon Theatre’s production of “Every Brilliant Thing” explores a child’s growing list of what makes life worth living when their mother suddenly goes to the hospital for depression. Director Jeff Adler and actors O’Neil Delapenha and Megan Hayes joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to talk about the play’s unique way of sharing both joy and sadness with an interactive audience. The show opens Horizon’s 38th season and runs through Feb. 27.

“Every Brilliant Thing,” written by Duncan MacMillan and Johnny Donahoe, is a one-person performance but invites plenty of participation from its all-ages audiences, as well as flexibility in its singular stage role. “The playwright has suggested that the person who is telling the story could, and should, be of any gender, age, ethnicity, and so we have cast three actors to play the role and trade-in performance of the role,” said Adler. “So we have a variety of actors that tell the story on different nights.”

Delapenha, one of the three actors taking on the storyteller role, emphasized the range of emotions captured in the play’s narrative. “It’s very true-to-life in that sense of, one minute, you can be feeling on top of the world because you’ve just met someone new and everything feels different and fuzzy and tingling inside, but at the same time, you can be thinking about how the same feelings came up in a different scenario and how it went down a different road, and make you feel sad or question the validity of the joy you’re feeling now,” Delapenha said. “I think the playwright does a wonderful job of going in and out of highs and lows just as we do in everyday life.”