“It is vital that we talk about mental health,” says Daniel Radcliffe’s character in Every Brilliant Thing, halfway through the dynamic one-man, one-act Broadway show. An hour later, shortly after his Thursday evening performance, the Tony-winning English actor—who is again a nominee this year—walked a stone’s throw across the street from the Hudson Theatre to The Lamb’s Club. Along with Mariska Hargitay, who will succeed him in the show later this month, and director Jeremy Herrin, Radcliffe was celebrated at an intimate après-theater supper organized by patrons and supporters of the Center for Youth Mental Health at NewYork-Presbyterian.
Dr. Zandy Forbes, Ayesha Shand, Dr. Charlie Shaffer, Elizabeth Shaffer, and Anna Wintour served as co-hosts for the evening. The guest list included familiar faces from New York’s art, theater, and fashion circles, as well as NewYork-Presbyterian physicians. Post-show, Louisa Jacobson, Derek Blasberg, Adam Baidawi, Bee Carrozzini, Robert Denning, Natalie Massenet, Greg Nobile, and Billy Norwich gathered in the Art Deco-style crimson and black dining room, where they discussed the play’s themes over cocktails and canapés ahead of the seated dinner.
Shortly before enjoying their entrées, Dr. Shaffer, a psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine, greeted guests with warm remarks. “As a psychiatrist, it’s very difficult to watch a play or a film about mental illness,” he began. “One of the great merits of this play is that there’s no psychiatry in it, and I think that it speaks to a real point about our world right now. Everybody knows we have a mental health crisis in this country right now, and certainly there are things that psychiatrists can do and treatments that we can offer that can make a real difference. But I think many of the solutions are actually going to come from outside the medical model. And that’s why it’s so captivating to see this play, where it’s the creative resilience of those directly affected that pulls the characters through. It’s the same resilience we see with our own patients and their families.”
In the critically acclaimed Broadway production, Radcliffe’s character tells the story of how he built a list of “everything brilliant about the world”—a list, effectively, of reasons to live. He creates it as a coping mechanism during childhood to help himself and his suicidal mother. As he re-enacts pivotal moments from his life and reflects on the list, which he adds to throughout adulthood—with the help of volunteers from the show’s jovial audience—he discovers the essence of joy while shedding light on the importance of support and community for those struggling with their mental health.
“I felt that the play was exactly what I needed. A real-life, shared communal human experience. It was theater with a capital T, and a really wonderful reminder of the beauty of life,” Jacobson told Vogue after the performance. “It’s such serious subject matter, but it is handled with so much grace and humor.”
“At the heart of the play is a story of loss, and an unsuccessful endeavor to keep someone alive,” Peter Hermann, who attended the dinner with Hargitay, his wife, told Vogue. “It’s always extraordinary to have one person telling a story, and then a group that bears witness. It is the most ancient storytelling format that we’ve got. There’s another level of beauty because the play, in its format, explicitly says, ‘I cannot tell this story alone.’ It’s about community.”
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