There’s a reason Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s Every Brilliant Thing has become a worldwide phenomenon: It finds humor, humanity, and unexpected joy in life’s hardest conversations. This June, Ensemble Theatre Company (ETC) brings the acclaimed one-person play to Santa Barbara in a production directed by Jenny Sullivan and starring Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper. Funny, brave, and profoundly human, Every Brilliant Thing begins with a child’s simple attempt to help their mother through depression by creating a list of everything worth living for. Ice cream. The color yellow. The sound of laughter. The list grows over decades, evolving alongside the narrator’s own life, loves, losses, and understanding of mental health.
For Mongiardo-Cooper, the play’s enduring impact lies in its honesty and optimism. “Hope is in woefully short supply at present,” he says. “The most important thing about this piece is that it offers genuinely life-affirming hope without sugar-coating the darkness that needs combatting.”
This balance of heartbreak, humor, and hope is central to the play’s emotional power. Though the story explores themes of mental health, it does so with warmth, wit, and a sense of intimacy. Audience members don’t just watch the story unfold — they become part of it. Each performance is shaped by the people in the room, creating a unique shared experience night after night.
“Theater artists always think of the audience as another character in the play,” says Sullivan. “Every Brilliant Thing brings that into sharp focus each night with a new audience. It is an interactive production that informs the journey of the performer and our audience.”
Mongiardo-Cooper agrees, noting that the energy audiences bring into the theater becomes “contagious,” making every performance wildly different from the last.
While Every Brilliant Thing is currently enjoying a successful Broadway revival, this is a piece that has been intentionally designed to feel rooted wherever it’s performed. Sullivan and Mongiardo-Cooper have embraced that concept fully with Ensemble Theatre Company’s production, incorporating Santa Barbara’s sense of spirit and community into the experience and further differentiating this production from others that have preceded it.
Much like the play’s narrator, both artists have put together their own lists of “brilliant things.” Sullivan’s includes “Monarch butterflies covering a tree” and “Joni Mitchell at the S.B. County Bowl,” while Mongiardo-Cooper cites “Joshua trees” and “people who can finish your sentences … and choose not to.”
For Ensemble Theatre Company, this production offers an opportunity to create a shared experience centered on empathy, vulnerability, and connection. In a cultural moment where conversations around mental health feel more vital than ever, Every Brilliant Thing manages to be both timely and timeless — encouraging audiences to laugh, reflect, and perhaps even begin their own lists as they leave the theater.
See the show June 3-21 at the New Vic (33 W. Victoria St.). Seeetcsb.org/production/every-brilliant-thing.
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