On May 9, the 40th anniversary of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge disaster, a special 15-minute video preview of Bill DeYoung’s one-man show, Mayday: Captain Lerro and the Skyway Bridge, will premiere via Facebook.
A 70-minute drama starring Michael Horn, Mayday was originally to have its world stage premiere in St. Petersburg on May 9. The play will debut sometime later this year at Opera Central, home of St. Petersburg Opera Company.
DeYoung, the author of Skyway: The True Story of Tampa Bay’s Signature Bridge and the Man Who Brought It Down (2013, University Press of Florida) and director Roxanne Fay realized the significance of the 40th anniversary, and decided to create the special video preview - roughly the first quarter of the show - to commemorate the event.
Horn stars as John Lerro, the Tampa harbor pilot at the command of the 20,000-ton Summit Venture when it struck the bridge on May 9, 1980. Thirty-five people were killed. Although he was fully exonerated by the courts – a rogue storm, undetected by weather instruments, was determined to be the cause – Lerro spent the rest of his life as a pariah in the community.
The Mayday video preview was produced by Joel Freedman of 2 Hungry Dogs Productions.
