A comedy about depression is essential watching at Theatre Charlotte
Theatre Charlotte's 'Every Brilliant Thing' runs through Sunday at Theatre Charlotte on Queens Road, then moves to Divine Barrel Brewing on April 30 and Free Range Brewing on May 7
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on April 25, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.
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Review: With honesty and wit, this one-woman show finds humor in the shadows of depression
Karisa Maxwell (above) is the star of the one-person show “Every Brilliant Thing,” which runs at Theatre Charlotte through Sunday and then will perform at two local breweries. (Photo by Kyle J Britt)
by Lawrence Toppman
Someone in my college Shakespeare course asked the professor why “Measure for Measure” is called a comedy, when it involves unjust imprisonment, attempted rape, prostitution, illegal pregnancy and a near-execution. He said Elizabethan plays were classified that way when the stage wasn’t heaped with corpses by the end. Characters had made it through alive and sane; that was their happy ending.
By that standard, “Every Brilliant Thing” qualifies. The narrator of the one-person show in Theatre Charlotte’s lobby this week (and, over the next two weeks, at local breweries) fights through a history of depression in her mother and herself by creating a list of everything that gives her joy. That list, carried through childhood and into the next decades, carries her past tough emotional places to an anticipation of peace and happiness.
The one-act show, anchored by Karisa Maxwell’s tour-de-force performance and Tina Kelly’s wisely fluid direction, is also comic in the usual way: We laugh as she ruefully bares her soul and interacts with folks in the audience, some planted there and some just surprised strangers. (If you don’t want to be one of those, sit in the back row of three.) Her improv skills boost her over any awkwardness as she passes among the crowd, and we get the rare sense of a story created before our eyes.
Duncan MacMillan wrote the play with comedian Jonny Donahoe, the first performer, for the Edinburgh Festival 11 years ago. It subsequently came to New York and was filmed for HBO. The races, genders and ages of the performers have changed many times in many countries over the years, for the theme could hardly be more universal.
Kelly says in a program note for Theatre Charlotte, “As a black director, I wanted to make sure we covered how depression and unhealthy mental health practices in the black community can be passed down generationally.” She originally cast Valerie Thames, who had to step down and mentored her replacement. But as the narrator remarks of us all, “If you live a long life without ever feeling crushingly depressed, you probably haven’t been paying attention.”
In this case — one the authors say was assembled from true and untrue stories — the 7-year-old starts the list to lift the spirits of her mother, who has been released from the hospital after her first attempt to kill herself.
The girl’s seemingly affectionate but distant father doesn’t know how to cope with such a deed in the 1990s. Nor does the girl, who makes the error most of us would: She believes a depressed person can be cheered up by having “every brilliant thing” in life pointed out to her. Not until she goes to college, where she falls in love yet still retains dark thoughts, does she realize her own depression is probably both imprinted by family behavior and hard-wired in her brain.
Only once does the play seem false. The narrator says, “I have some really simple advice for people contemplating suicide: Don’t do it. Things get better.” They don’t always, certainly not without professional psychiatric help (mentioned only in passing) and/or medication to treat depression (never mentioned at all).
The rest of the time, the unnamed narrator honestly and often wittily explores the circumstances and consequences of a life where emotional clouds can gather suddenly and thickly on what seem like sunny occasions. Some of us will relate to her dilemma from personal experiences, some from contacts with friends or family members. But if you can’t relate to her at all, you’re not yet a fully formed human being.
If You’re Going: “Every Brilliant Thing” runs Friday-Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in the lobby at Theatre Charlotte, 501 Queens Rd. It moves to Divine Barrel Brewing, 3701 N Davidson St. Suite #203, April 30 at 7:30 p.m., and Free Range Brewing, 2320 N Davidson St., May 7 at 7:30 p.m.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger’s Toppman on the Arts newsletter.
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