theatre KAPOW has always aimed to bring the audience as close to the action as possible. In the company’s 17 year history, no play has ever done that quite like Every Brilliant Thing, which entirely relies on the audience to tell the story, inviting audience members to use their bodies and their voices to contribute to the play itself.
Longtime audience member and friend of tKAPOW, Eric Gutterson, has been visiting the Every Brilliant Thing rehearsal room throughout the process to play “test audience” and help the company experiment with the play’s audience participation. Eric provided some insight about this experience, and about what makes Every Brilliant Thing particularly special. Read Eric’s thoughts on the play and process below:
Q: How is the audience experience for Every Brilliant Thing unique from other plays?
A: The obvious answer is that the audience can be more involved- become a part of the story. Being involved as an audience member might only be expected at an event like a magic show, illusionist, hypnotist, etc. The typical expectation as an audience member at a play is that you attend, find your seat, watch the show from a third-person perspective, and that is the full scope of the experience. Every Brilliant Thing welcomes willing participants into the story. One audience member might recite a Brilliant Thing out of a list of very many things. Or to a greater extent, one might take on a character, a person in the narrator’s life. The relationship with the actor is more intimate – they see you, they listen to what you have to say, and the interaction becomes part of the show.
Q: What feelings does the play evoke for you as an audience member?
A: Laughter, sadness, joy, longing, and a sense of togetherness. There is a sense of community between the actor, audience, and everyone in the building. Also, the play doesn’t shy away from being real. There are dark tones, but you come up for air early and often with frequent moments of comic relief.
Q: What has your experience been like in the rehearsal process and being a part of helping the team develop the piece?
A: The rehearsal process has been a lot of fun. It has required careful consideration and respect for the audience, and for the level of engagement each individual might be comfortable with on show night. It feels like each moment is tailored with this in mind. The actor is faced with a constant challenge of not knowing what an audience member might do. When being a “guest audience member”, my goal has been to present several possible audience responses, sometimes ordinary, sometimes a little crazy. The play requires keen improvisation from the actor, which might be my favorite thing ever, because it can bring about hilarious, unexpected, unique scenarios that you’ll only experience once. I’m excited to see how it all comes together.
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EVERY BRILLIANT THING By Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe
February 7-9, 2025 BNH Stage in Concord, NH
February 21-23rd, 2025 Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Meredith, NH
Theatre KAPOW’s second mainstage production, Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, is well underway! Having started rehearsals a month ago, director Emma Cahoon and actors Peter Josephson and Carey Cahoon have been hard at work unpacking the puzzle as the performance dates approach.
Emma Cahoon is a theatre-maker dedicated to the art of asking questions. A graduate of Boston University with a BFA in Theatre Arts, Emma has worked with organizations across the country including Central Square Theater, What Would the Neighbors Say?, the Seven Devils New Play Foundry, and more. Emma is very grateful to be working with theatre KAPOW again, with her previous directing credits including A Midsummer Night’s Dream for St. Anselm College’s Shakespeare on the Green and performance credits including Life Sucks. (Sonia), The Penelopiad (Maid), and Translations (Sarah). Emma’s directing practice centers elevating and exploring dramatic texts to their fullest depths, while building collaborative environments built on equal parts creativity, joy, and rigor, and working on Every Brilliant Thing has been a challenge and a joy for her.
Emma shared a bit about the unique experience of rehearsing this particular play and what she hopes audiences will get from it. Read the conversation below!
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Q: How is Every Brilliant Thing unique from other plays you’ve worked on?
A: Every Brilliant Thing is a one person play, but it can’t be done alone because it relies heavily on audience participation. So there’s a script, but it can never be repeated exactly the same way. With two actors performing the play on alternating nights and an entirely different audience each time, every single performance will be different. It really takes the magic of the live theatre to the next level. It’s my feeling that every play should feel not just like a thing to be witnessed, but like a communal event. With this play, evoking that feeling is necessary. Every Brilliant Thing tells the story of a person grappling with their mother’s depression, and about the endless search for what makes this life worth living. So often, the answer to that question comes down to the people around us. That’s what Macmillan is reminding us by requiring the audience to be a part of the story; the only way through is together. So not only is the content of the piece unique and beautiful, but so is the way the story is told- in the round, with the house lights up throughout, and with the audience actively participating in the storytelling.
Q: What are some challenges and opportunities that this piece presents to a director and creative team?
A: Rehearsing and staging a one person play presents its own challenges, as does staging in the round. I’m constantly looking for ways to make sure everyone can see and hear the actor without creating repetitive stage pictures. But our biggest challenge and our biggest opportunity is with the audience participation. What the audience will say or do or be willing to engage in is one giant variable we can’t control- it’s thrilling and terrifying! So much magic will be made in real time, surprising both the audience and the actor at the same instant. The caveat there is, of course, that we can’t plan it ahead of time. Peter and Carey and I are all artists who like plans- I like to be very specific with my staging and pacing, and Peter and Carey are typically actors who like to know what it is they are doing in every moment of a play so that they can surrender to the present when performing it. That sort of forward planning is not an option here. So our rehearsal process has been more of an investigation of what variables we can control and what possibilities lie within the variables we have no control over at all. I’m sure the audience will surprise us every night, and as terrifying as it is, I can’t wait to watch it happen.
Peter Josephson (right) in rehearsal with guest audience member Cecilia Lomanno (left).
Q: What has the rehearsal process been like as you work through this piece?
A: I knew early on that we would need to invite guests into the rehearsal room to experiment with the audience participation. We’re a month into the process now and we’ve had at least one test audience guest at every single rehearsal, and that has been immensely valuable. I can’t imagine rehearsing it any other way- otherwise I’d be running around the room playing 60 people while also trying to direct, and for obvious reasons that would not have worked. I’m so grateful to the guests who have lent their time, energy and their brilliant minds to our rehearsal room so we can figure out how to provide some loose shape to each of the audience’s participatory moments. It’s also been fascinating to work with both Peter and Carey, who are two very different actors. Their approaches to the text are unique from each other, and while they have been learning so much from the other in rehearsal, we are finding two very different versions of the same play. That’s been an interesting part of the process as well.
Q: What do you hope the audience gets out of the experience?
A: I hope that this play reminds our audiences of how important it is to hold each other. How important it is to really look at, really listen to, really be with someone. So much about our current world is so isolating. Most of us spend our time looking down at screens, and oftentimes looking up at what is going on around us is utterly overwhelming. But I think that these kinds of communal experiences, and the ability to really be in conversation with each other, are going to be essential for us in the coming years. I hope that audiences come to Every Brilliant Thing and remember that brilliant things are everywhere. Reasons to stay are everywhere. And if you’re having trouble seeing them, maybe start by looking to the people sitting right next to you.
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EVERY BRILLIANT THING By Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe
February 7-9, 2025 BNH Stage in Concord, NH
February 21-23rd, 2025 Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Meredith, NH
Robert Fabricio Armstrong (Jonny/Martin) has been traveling an actors path since the age of 9. His training includes: studying/performing at Davenport School of the Arts in acting/music/dance, attending various local acting and dance programs in Davenport, FL , and attending The New York Conservatory of Dramatic Arts for college. Notable performance credits include “In the Heights” directed by Eliseo Roman (OBC of In the Heights) at Broadway Palm (Fort Meyers,FL), performing with Camp Broadway at Carnegie Hall and the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade, being a Seacoast Rep Company Member for the 2023 season, “Jasper” in “The Aliens” directed by Bardo Theatre Company at The Players Ring, and most recently “Rum Tum Tugger” In “Cats” at the Seacoast Repertory Theatre. He encourages everyone to find what makes them happy in life and pursue it with unrelenting faith.
Charlie Berger (Dodger/Titus) is an Actor, Director, Comedian, and Writer based in the Boston area. Charlie received a BFA from Boston University in Theatre Arts Performance with concentrations in directing and playwriting. Charlie is also an improvisational comedian and is currently performing at Improv Asylum, where he also runs tech for scripted and unscripted comedy. Charlie explores how to engage with the serious acting training as a comedic actor, constantly looking for new ways to experiment with the pedagogy. Charlie is a strong advocate for new works in theatre. His passions for playwriting and directing have been cultivated in the new works festival at Boston University, in which he developed seven new plays written by his peers, concluding in his senior year by directing in the Booth Theater. Charlie was awarded the Milan Stitt New Works Award for his work as a director of new plays at Boston University.
Samantha Griffin (Madeline/Henny) is a theatre artist currently based in New Hampshire. This is her sixth time working with theatre KAPOW and her first in the ARTiculate series. In addition to acting, she has recently worked as an intimacy choreographer across the state. Favorite acting credits include A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (theatre KAPOW), SEUSSICAL! THE MUSICAL (Firehouse Center for the Arts), and SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE (Columbia College Chicago). Samantha holds a BFA in Musical Theatre Performance with a minor in Playwriting from Columbia College Chicago.
Peter Josephson (Henry/Rembrandt) is in his fourteenth season as a company member of the theatre KAPOW. An accomplished actor and director, he has been nominated for Seacoast Spotlight awards for both acting and directing, and has won two New Hampshire Theatre Awards for his roles in Penelope and Exit the King (both with tKAPOW). In addition to tKapow he has performed with the New Hampshire Theatre Project, the Winnipesaukee Playhouse, and the Seven Stages Shakespeare Company, and has directed for theatreKapow, the New Hampshire Theatre Project, Threshold Stage, and Glass Dove Productions. Peter most recent productions with theatre KAPOW include Macbeth,Mr. Wolf, Tiny Beautiful Things, and The Thanksgiving Play. He leads occasional acting workshops in the Michael Chekhov technique. For more than 40 years (!) he has benefited from the love and support of his wife Becky, without whom he would be a shadow of his present self.
Walter Maroney (Homer/Simon)has previously appeared with Theatre KAPOW as the Professor in this season’s production of Life Sucks and as Robert Lyon, an art teacher, in a staged reading of The Pitmen Painters at the Currier.
Jessica Dickey (playwright) hails from Waynesboro, PA, and lives in Brooklyn. She received her BFA from Boston University and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. Jessie made her playwriting debut with The Amish Project, about the 2006 Nickel Mines school shooting in an Amish community, premiered at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater to rave reviews. The Amish Project has been produced all over the country and the world. Jessie’s play Charles Ives Take Me Home also premiered at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, which resulted in a nomination for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for playwriting. The Convent, a dark comedy about a group of women who try to live like nuns in the middle ages, premiered Off-Broadway this year in a sold-out co-production with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Rising Phoenix and WeatherVane, and is now being developed into a series for Sarah Jessica Parker’s company Pretty Matches. Her next world premiere is coming up this season on the west coast: Nan and the Lower Body is a dark comedy about the creation of the Pap Smear and her maternal grandmother (commissioned by Manhattan Theater Club and the Sloan.)
Since returning to in-person rehearsal rooms and performance spaces after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, safety and well-being took top priority among tKAPOW’s practices. Of course this meant testing, masking and livestreaming whenever possible and necessary, but it also meant reconsidering our theatre-making process with our actor’s wellbeing as the top priority. Like all art forms, acting is incredibly vulnerable. It requires one to put their body into various states of physicality and emotion, and even though we know cognitively that the circumstances are fictional, our bodies cannot always tell the difference. This is the reason that Intimacy and Combat choreographers have become essential members of well-rounded, safe theatrical teams.
Theatre KAPOW has been working with Intimacy and Combat Choreographers consistently since the start of our fifteenth season. At the most basic level, Intimacy and Stage Combat Choreographers are responsible for creating the sequences of movement that make up moments of physically intimate contact between two or more characters, such as stage kisses, slaps or even weapon work. It’s a means with which to choreograph a character’s most raw and impulsive actions while keeping them organic and appearing completely un-choreographed.
“A stage combat choreographer looks at the violence of a piece. So if there is either scripted violence, or a director has an idea of violence that might occur based on the acceleration of the scene, we are brought in to look at the background of the characters and dramaturgically assess what kind of choreography would fit on the bodies of two people engaged in a violent encounter, or the bodies of two characters who are engaged in a violent encounter and where those intersections come together,” shared Kyrie Ellison-Keller, who has worked with tKAPOW as both an intimacy and combat choreographer. Kyrie has choreographed two instances of violence for our September production, LIFE SUCKS. “My favorite Stage Combat Company to study with, Neutral Chaos Combat, they call us all Violent Dance Magicians. What we’re doing is we’re choreographing violence, but violence on stage is inherently not real, so it’s choreographed illusion. And if it’s done well, it looks violent.”
Samantha Griffin, Intimacy Choreographer for LIFE SUCKS., grew up as a dancer and finds the two artforms very comparable. “My dance background informs a lot of the ways that I choreograph without using sexualized language,” she says. “With dance, we’re very specific, like: on this exact count you move your hand this way, and on the next count you step here. That’s how I approach choreographing intimacy. I give people counts. I ask: how many steps will it take you to close this gap between you? I give actors a certain amount of seconds to hold a kiss or an embrace, and use the language of music and dance like ‘staccato’ or ‘languid.”’
Kyrie shared similar sentiments, saying that “a lot of the language [fight choreographers use] is co-opted from dance words, because most of the time when you walk into the room as a fight choreographer, you’re not getting to work with people who have been trained in weapons. You get to work with people who might have a really strong movement background, or who might have danced for 20 years, and you have to find ways to adapt.” Plus, she shared an interesting tidbit about the origins of swordplay language; dating all the way back to the 15th century, Fencing and Ballet were studied by the upper middle class simultaneously, which created an overlap in their terminologies.
That being said, creating choreography is not the only purpose of having an intimacy professional in the space. “Intimacy choreography is a practice that’s been developing over generations. In simple terms, yes, it’s the practice of consent and boundaries for actors. We are people who can come into the space and arm actors and professionals with language and tools to create a consent-based environment that will safely allow us to step into characters and emotions that are not our own,” says Griffin. “A lot of my practice is working with actors playing emotionally-turbulent roles to figure out how they can connect and disconnect from them, so that they do not carry it with them into their personal lives.” Ellison-Keller adds: “There’s so much about stage combat and intimacy that looks really easy, because we do our jobs really really well. The people who come into those spaces to choreograph instances of heightened emotional turmoil have sensitivity training, have trauma-informed training, have choreographic training, and have experience beyond just looking at how to make something look violent or intense.”
A shared sentiment between the two was that their work goes beyond simply creating movement sequences. Sam says she thinks of herself as “an advocate for the actors,” and Kyrie says that “for a lot of people we’re check boxes, but we empower creators and creatives to tell risky narratives in a way that doesn’t end their careers.” Kyrie encourages any theatre professionals or companies who are interested in the work but are unsure where to start to simply ask questions. Both Kyrie Ellison-Keller and Sam Griffin remarked that the two mediums are commonly misunderstood and shied away from, but that the work is essential to the sustainable creation of bold theatre.
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Join us for the first production of our 17th Season, LIFE SUCKS. by Aaron Posner (sort of adapted from Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov) at the BNH Stage in Concord, NH on September 20, 21, and 22! Tickets are available here.
Thanks to Samantha Griffin and Kyrie Ellison-Keller for providing their insight and for the incredible work they do!
