Every Brilliant Thing's Jonny Donahoe on Bringing the Show to HBO, Making Mental Health Approachable & the Genius of Feta Cheese

Following the film adaptations of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill and All the Way this year, HBO has once again brought the New York stage to the screen with Every Brilliant Thing. Comedian Jonny Donahoe headlined the solo show at the Barrow Street Theatre in 2015, having previously toured the U.K. with it. The play follows a man from adolescence to adulthood as he compiles a list of brilliant things in the hopes of cheering up his depressed and suicidal mother. Producers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato captured footage from multiple performances during the off-Broadway run for the HBO presentation, premiering on December 26.

Broadway.com recently spoke with Donahoe about revisiting the show on screen, his unsuspecting co-stars and the importance of discussing mental health.

The way you tell this story is extremely intimate and feels very personal, but it’s not autobiographical. Where does the narrator of the show end and Jonny Donahoe begin?
It's inherently truthful of my life, and it's also true to [writer] Duncan MacMillan's, but none of the story happened to us. We say it's based on true and untrue stories. Whilst the narrator hasn't lived my story, there are a huge number of similarities, and that life has been lived by a number of people. We've met those people, we've talked to them, and we're trying to tell their story eloquently and as well as we possibly can.

Were there any steps in putting this show together with MacMillan and director George Perrin that were particularly difficult to navigate?
More than anything else, we wanted to make sure that the truth of the story was never forgotten. Depression is going to appear in your life, whether you like it or not. It's something you need to be able to talk about and have the tools with which to understand it. It was really important that we didn't shy away from how hard that is. The dramatist's urge is to be dramatic. We didn’t want to oversell the drama. It was quite a challenge to just lay things out exactly as they are and not sugarcoat with language or metaphor.

Did the audience being such an important component make rehearsing a challenge?
Definitely. You can learn the things you have to say and the order to say them in, but you can't do it without the crowd. It's very much like standup. A standup comic doesn't sit down and write a one-hour narrative. They try this bit, they try that bit, and they fit them together. We'd try stuff out with Paines Plough; we'd insist that at four in the afternoon everyone in the office puts down their laptops and come in, and I would do a new bit.

Some audience members you interact with in the filmed version—particularly the man who plays your father—seem almost too perfect to be improvising. Is there a trick to scouting the right participant?
That dad is a masterstroke of luck. He was a rabbi; I hadn't met him before and haven't seen him since. Watching it back, it seems like he knew what to do—because he did. You set out rules all through the show without the audience really spotting it to create a sense of absolute safety. That means anyone can do anything and is welcome. There is something unique about improvisation when it works. It would take them months to get the spontaneity if you were to write it and rehearse it. It exists in and of that moment. That rings true with people because that's what life is like.

Why do you think this show works as a filmed production if the live audience is so essential?
The audience is very much the set around you. You see all of them. Randy and Fenton filmed it so extraordinarily beautifully. It's unobtrusive. We had 17 or 19 cameras, and they had gone to great lengths to hide every single one of them. They filmed it in a way that David Attenborough would film Planet Earth. You don't want to spook the lions, so the cameras are hidden in rocks and under trees.

What do you hope someone struggling with any sort of mental health issue takes from the show?
Life is hard, but tomorrow will be better than today. The hardest thing with people who are suicidal is that suicide only needs to win once. Life has to win out every single day. But it is always a mistake to take your life. If you are at the worst, talk to people. Share with people. Do anything but take such a drastic and pervasive action. Tomorrow could be better. It may not be brilliant, but it will be better.

New York audiences saw Every Brilliant Thing in early 2015, but why is this story important to be heard now?
I'm a political person, and it's important that I steer away from answering that question politically, because people vote for things that I disagree with like Brexit and Trump. In both those cases, it's very hard to justify some of the voting. What is demonstrably clear, though, is that people are hurting, and they're reacting. That has to be dealt with, and it hasn't been. There are reasons why these things have happened, and we have to keep going. I hope you see past the darkness and have some hope. It’s not a political piece, but I think if there's one thing this work is about, it's the value of believing in hope.

To wrap things up on a lighter note, what would be the first three items on your list of brilliant things?
The first thing I would have on my list—what I really love more than anything else is feta cheese. That's a magnificent piece of work. Well done, whoever invented that. That's a real win for mankind. I'm also an enormous fan of single malt scotch. The last thing? More time. How do we do that? The promise of more time.