While living in the U.K. a decade ago, Bonnie Duff watched a friend prepare an audition monologue from a play that had been the talk of the Edinburgh Fringe the year before. That play, Sam Steiner’s Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, has kept a hold on her ever since. It has now become her first full-length directing project, presented by her company, Theatre Aurinko, at The Assembly Theatre.
Steiner’s two-hander premiered at Warwick Arts Centre in 2015, won three Judges’ Awards at the National Student Drama Festival, and reached London’s West End in 2023 with Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner. Toronto audiences may remember the play from The Howland Company’s production at the 2017 Toronto Fringe Festival, where it earned a Patron’s Pick designation..
The story revolves around a government-issued “Hush Law,” which caps every citizen at 140 spoken words a day. Bernadette (played in the Theatre Aurinko production by Lara Lucia), who is a lawyer, and Oliver (Jack Copland), who is a musician and activist, meet and fall for each other. The challenge is how they must ration the language of their love. The scenes leap across the law’s arrival, and the dystopia stays deliberately sketchy. It’s more of a pressure test than a world-building exercise, and the result is an 80-minute rom-com with teeth.
Why Lemons? Why now?
Duff explains that she was “very taken with the way the playwright used this couple’s relationship to discuss class and gender and social mobility and censorship — without being a play that is about censorship.”
She loves its “heart and humour” inside “a really big dystopic science-fiction frame”. It boasts “a big buy-in that feels very theatrical: the kind of thing that can only be theatre.” That pronouncement, she laughs, is “very Bonnie-coded.” By way of elaboration, she hones in on “a big suspension of disbelief that results in the play being not just about the little people and their little lives within it, but a big ‘what-if’ that inspires that kind of curiosity.”
So why this play at this time? Duff grants that “every year feels like a bigger ‘what-if.’ How is it possible that we are in this? Every year feels crazier and crazier, and we see relationships — not even just romantic ones, but relationships with parents or with friends — deteriorating under the tension of massive life events. And yet we still get up, go to work every day, and go see the people we love.” The play, she argues, understands how language helps to bridge these gaps. “There’s so much noise in the world around the discussion of atrocities that happen every day. And yet, I think a huge part of the conversation should be: ‘what are key people not saying?’ That’s really the thing this play explores: what is said and what is not said — and what that means in our relationships with each other and with our government.”
Why Theatre Aurinko?
Purposefully, her company’s name reflects its own light. Duff is from Finland, and the word “Aurinko” is Finnish for “sun.” She first founded Theatre Aurinko to stage her own play This Feels Like the End at the 2024 Next Stage Festival, and the name stuck: “the light bulb going off, the brightness, the sun. That name still spoke something to me.” A sold-out Aurenko improv-meets-Shakespeare Macbeth followed this spring. Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons is a different proposition, yet she sees a certain continuity in the way “this play is kind of goofy and kind of scrappy, within a big frame.”
Duff and I have been crossing paths for a while now, in the orbits of Crow’s Theatre and Guild Festival Theatre, so it was a pleasure to finally sit down with her properly. When I ask why she chose to direct the play instead of perform in it, she shares that “over the last couple of years since moving to Toronto, in cobbling together a life of theatre-making, I found myself wearing a lot of hats.” In addition to Aurinko endeavours, she has stage-managed Little Shop of Horrors and worked as an artistic associate at Guild Festival Theatre – where she assistant-directed Tyler J. Seguin’s adaptation of Northanger Abbey this summer.
She has come to realize that these hats work best when they are stacked together. And “the way that experiences in production management and stage management and performing become the most useful under one hat is in directing. You have this comprehensive knowledge of how a piece of theatre gets from page to stage — and you can draw on all of it.” For her, a big part of Lemons‘ appeal is its intimate scale. “It’s not a 50-person musical. It feels like something that can use a very specific, contained process and focus, while still exploring a lot of interesting topics that get me going.”
Making theatrical Lemon-ade
The cast list reads like a director trusting her instincts … with a sprinkling of kismet. Duff first saw Copland as a ham in the Guild Festival farce Three Men on a Bike. When I mention how different he looked from this role to the next one I saw him in (The Moors), Duff laughs in agreement. When he walked into the audition room to deliver a monologue about censorship and activism, she did a double-take: “I genuinely had a moment where I was like, ‘Is this a different Jack Copland?’ It was shape-shifting!” Equally striking was his “capacity for plain honesty”— a real gift in a play that is preoccupied with truth and concealment. “Jack is so easy to fall in love with on stage,” she enthuses. “He just has this openness.”
Copland’s co-star Lucia arrives via musical theatre, and this is her second full professional play. Her first (though not her first professional production) was this summer’s Guild Festival Theatre smash Brontë: The World Without. (Read the Sesaya Arts profile of her here.) What won Duff over was Lucia’s comic gift. “In a play about all these very serious things, and especially in a two-person play, you can easily get into ‘argue mode’, or the tension (and there’s a lot of tension in this play). But there’s so much comedy in it, and Lara was perfect in it right away, finding the comedy and the love.” And at the callbacks, even though the two actors had never met, Duff “totally believed that they were in love — which is so hard to do on a first pass.”
Rehearsal for the play has also dismantled some of Duff’s long-held assumptions. She had believed Bernadette to be cold and Oliver impulsive, then learned that remembering a play is not the same as constructing one. “You’re not building caricature,” she observes. “Not only are you building fully fledged people, you actually have fully fledged people building them, too, bringing them to life.”
Her shift from actor to director has ultimately re-wired her questions. “As a director it’s: ‘What is the most useful choice for the narrative and for the world?’ Not necessarily ‘What is this character’s perspective?’ but ‘What builds this world and this story most effectively and clearly for the audience?” She notes with gratitude how scenic designer Kenzia Dalie, lighting designer Jay Hines and sound designer Jake Schindler are building that world alongside her.
Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons
“There are plays where sometimes I wonder: did this have to be a play?” Duff muses. But she never asked this once of Lemons. “What Sam Steiner has done so beautifully, and what we’re really hoping to bring to justice, is that this can only be a play. Because it is about what we say and how we say it, and how that affects not only the people around us, but the world at large, and thus the audience.”
It is, she smiles, “the theatrical version of a thought experiment, and I think it’s a thought experiment that everyone can have fun with.” But in case we’re reading too much into the play’s title, she clarifies that “there is very little citrus content in the play”. Instead, what the title points to is larger questions: “We all have a limited time on this planet, and we have a limited time with the people that we love. Are we using that time wisely? Are we using our words wisely?”
A full decade after her friend’s fateful monologue preparation, Duff is giving all of Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons her distinctive voice. I came away from our conversation wanting keenly to hear it.
Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons runs November 6–15, 2026, at The Assembly Theatre, 1479 Queen St. W., Toronto. Tickets are available at todocanada.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
