A Spring Hill playwright brings his newest work home this Saturday
Brian S. Brijbag, who has had plays staged off-Broadway and abroad, premieres "One Seat Over" at Stage West Playhouse on 22 August — the anchor of the theatre's New Works Festival on the Nature Coast.
A playwright whose work has reached stages in New York and overseas is opening his newest full-length play a little closer to home this weekend. Brian S. Brijbag premieres One Seat Over at Stage West Playhouse in Spring Hill on Saturday, 22 August, and, billed as a world premiere, it is the headline event of the theatre’s New Works Festival.
Spring Hill sits in Hernando County, at the southern end of the Nature Coast, and Stage West is the community’s long-running playhouse — a volunteer theatre that has been staging live work in Hernando for more than forty years. That makes the choice of venue part of the story the production is telling. Brijbag once chaired the Hernando County Fine Arts Council, and the announcement leans on the symmetry: a writer produced well beyond the county premiering his latest play in the place his arts career began.
The play itself is an unusual piece of construction. One Seat Over is a set of ten two-character scenes, each set aboard something in motion — a Staten Island ferry, a gondola at Jackson Hole, a kayak off Oahu, a glacier train in Alaska, a Mississippi casino riverboat among them. The conceit is that every ride hands one passenger to the next, so a character stranded in one scene turns up somewhere else entirely a few journeys later. The whole thing is staged on two benches, and the production describes it as a comedy about grief, faith and the strangers you end up sitting beside.
The cast is drawn largely from Stage West regulars. Peter Pius plays Sal, an ageing shoeshine man working the ferry; Bella Bermel Bonati plays Piper, a wellness influencer who has an epiphany mid-kayak; and Jacob Mandelin and Dalton Benson feature among the company. A talkback with the playwright and cast follows Saturday’s performance.
Brijbag, who is also a Hernando County attorney and an anthropologist by training, is not a newcomer to the wider theatre scene. His plays have been produced off-Broadway in New York, at The Players Theatre and the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival, and internationally — including at Center Stage Israel. According to the production, he is a 2026 winner at the BroadwayWorld Tampa awards and took the 2026 Verna Safran Prize at Theatre Odyssey in Sarasota; both are claims the theatre and his own listings put forward, and worth reading as the billing rather than an independent verdict.
One Seat Over anchors a three-day festival of entirely new work, running 21–23 August, that also includes a slate of ten-minute plays, an improv battle, showtune karaoke and a second full-length premiere, Dinner for Six by Lil Barcaski. Food trucks and cantina service run across the weekend.
If you want to go
Curtain is 7.30pm on Saturday, 22 August, with doors at 7pm, at Stage West Playhouse, 8390 Forest Oaks Blvd, Spring Hill, FL 34606. Single tickets are $15; a $35 all-access pass covers the full festival. The box office number is 352-683-5113, and programme details are posted at oneseatoverplay.com. Times and prices are as given by the production; confirm with the theatre before travelling.