Every Brilliant Thing: The Why Behind the Play

On January 21st, the Utah Shakespeare Touring Company acted out a unique performance for the Orem High Student Body.
This company has been to 76 schools throughout Utah in hopes to “create an active dialogue with students about expression, increase awareness in schools of resources available for students, and to provide an artistic experience that enables young people to see things from a new perspective and, hopefully, shed some light from a different direction.”
Lt. Governor Spencer J. Cox said, “Unfortunately, suicide has become far too prevalent in Utah and has especially afflicted our youth. This project addresses that issue with a different and impactful approach.”
Originally Duncan Macmillan had written it as a book, but wanted to go further and called Jonny Donahoe to make it “a very funny show about suicide and depression.”
“Everything I’ve written, I’ve written because I’m looking for something in our culture and I’m not seeing it. With Every Brilliant Thing for instance, it was realizing depression and suicide is something that effects everybody,” Duncan Macmillan said.
“Suicide and depression are often either stigmatized and ignored or it’s almost glamorized. We have a responsibility to talk about it in a responsible way,” he continued.
“We all experience lows, we all experience difficult things and we have to keep sort of laughing and smiling and moving on. You’ve got to find a language and a way to cope with it and I think laughter is just absolutely the best way to do it,” Jonny Donahoe said.