Season Select: Once Upon a Bridge

This week's Season Select illuminates this season's most mysterious play, Sonya Kelly's Once Upon a Bridge.

Once Upon a Bridge

By Sonya Kelly

Directed by Laura Rook

Fast Facts

Playing: Touchstone Theatre | June 27 - October 7
Featuring: La Shawn Banks, Elizabeth Reese, Marcus Truschinski
Genre: Contemporary Drama
Last Seen at APT: First time!
Go If You Liked: The Unexpected Man (2017), Molly Sweeney (2013), Shakespeare's Will (2012)

Three lives intersect for the space of a single breath; their well-planned worlds knocked right off their axes in the space of seconds. But maybe the moment itself doesn’t matter. It’s what comes next that will determine who they truly are when the dust settles. It’s something we all face, in a fashion. The way life changes on a dime. The way our humanity is tested and twisted. And the way it can bounce back if we are able to evolve. To forgive. It’s the kind of play we’re thrilled to fold into the embrace of the Touchstone – compact and thrilling, and exquisitely poetic. Based on a true event that mesmerized London, Once Upon a Bridge is a lyrical and uplifting meditation on the moments that shake us, and the small acts that may help us heal, if we only let them.

About Once Upon a Bridge

Sonya Kelly is an Irish playwright largely known for her smart comedies like Furniture, How to Keep an Alien and The Wheelchair on My Face. But when she was commissioned by Irish touring theater company, Druid, to write a new work inspired by the pandemic, she did something a little different. And Once Upon a Bridge was born. The play originally streamed online (pandemics, right?) and is a compact and moving series of soliloquys. It is a story about how humans interact, told by three characters on stage who, largely, do not interact with each other. It is thrilling and utterly beautiful; a poem with life-and-death stakes. Brought to life by three exquisite actors - La Shawn Banks, who you've seen many times at APT, most recently in Oedipus (2021); Elizabeth Reese, last seen here as Helena in the 2017 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Marcus Truschinski, a man you may recognize from his work here over the past decade plus (most recently one of the gems of the 2022 season, Stones in His Pockets). Tickets to this particular play are selling quickly, so get your seats and join us for this exquisite work of art.

Brenda DeVita Says

Jimmy and I watched this play online during the pandemic. And while we were watching it, I thought wow, Laura Rook would be great in this play. And then I thought, wait. Laura Rook would be great for this play. Laura is an amazing actor; she's done incredible work on APT’s stages, and other stages around the country. We love her, and our audience loves her. And she's been doing more work off-stage, and she's got great artistic instincts that make her a natural director. She directed me and Kelsey Brennan in The How and the Why at Two Crows Theatre in 2020. And we're sort of in love with this play. And I think everyone who sees it will fall in love with it, as well. It’s this tiny play with so much to say about humanity, and fate, and forgiveness. It’s written in verse, with that kind of flowing, silky language that you can almost feel in the air around you. And at the same time, the story is pretty intense, and explores the privilege and anger that so many people still carry through the world, and inflict on folks around them, whether they know each other or not. It’s based on a true story that was pretty shocking, and the police have closed the case on it with no real answers. So this is Sonya Kelly’s answer to what might have happened during that series of events, and how the people involved may have come out of it.

Want to learn more? Check out this incredible essay on the intense art of playwrighting Sonya Kelly from Druid. And for more about the story that inspired the play (warning: beware of spoilers), check out Wired UK's investigation of the events and the aftermath.