Historic Boston church to host first play

Old North Church played a pivotal role in the U.S.' fight for independence and has continued to be an active house of worship for 300 years. One of Boston's most popular tourist attractions was yesterday also, for the first time, a theater hosting an original play.

"Revolution's Edge," set the day before the start of the American Revolution, is a dramatic imagining of the interactions of three real people with different views whose lives are about to be upended by the impending war, and explores what the events will mean for their families.

The play opening yesterday is set just hours before two men hung two lanterns in the church's bell tower on April 18, 1775 — to signal that British soldiers were heading across the Charles River, and to Lexington and Concord. The event has been immortalized in the line "One if by land, and two if by sea" in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1860 poem "Paul Revere's Ride."

"This is a moment of intense drama and a moment of pivotal importance to the lives of these three men," said playwright Patrick Gabridge.

One of the characters is Minister Mather Byles Jr., who remains loyal to the British crown while another, vestry member Capt. John Pulling Jr., is an ardent Patriot, and one of the two men who would hang the lanterns in the tower.

Cato, who does not have a last name, is a man enslaved by Byles.

Gabridge is the producing artistic director of Plays in Place, an organization that works with historic sites and cultural institutions to create site-specific plays and presentations. To ensure historical accuracy, he did six months of painstaking research into historical archives.

"In the end, it has to be a dramatic play that's going to engage an audience and it has to be a play that's...