The posters were everywhere in Edinburgh for “The Bridge,” Alaa Shehada’s solo show, one of the 17 winners of this year’s prestigious Fringe First Awards. I had already been lucky enough to see three of these 17 shows (selected from more than 4,000!) – Tether, The Singer, and Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It – and I was able to squeeze into “The Bridge” shortly before it closed.

Shehada focuses in “The Bridge” on what sounds like a simple story — the journey he took from his home in the West Bank to deliver a yellow cannister of his family’s olive oil to his aunt in Jordan. But he uses his gifts as a comedian to inject some warmth and humor; his skill as a performer to portray the many people he meets along the way, a cross-section of an entire community; and his passion as an advocate to drive home what he sees as the everyday horrors of life for Palestinians on the West Bank.

What’s most remarkable for me about “The Bridge,” though, is that I got to see it at all. 

“The Bridge” is a follow-up to his previous solo show “The Horse of Jenin,” which also won a Fringe First Award.  Before Edinburgh, Shehada had brought “The Horse of Jenin” to New York for a four-day run at the Under the Radar Festival in January 2025. But after Edinburgh, when he returned for a more extensive run in the U.S., both Off Broadway and on an American tour, he was stopped at JFK International Airport. Despite his valid O-1B visa, he said he was questioned for hours, “handcuffed and transferred to an immigration detention facility in New Jersey,” then sent the next morning back to Amsterdam, where he now lives.

“About a month later, the Trump administration issued an expansive travel ban that suspended visa issuance to individuals applying using any travel documents issued or endorsed by the Palestinian Authority.” (More details here, here and here)

The bridge of the title, variously named  Allenby Bridge (by the British and Israelis,) King Hussein Bridge (by the Jordanians) and Al-Jisr  (by the Palestinians) is, Shehada tells us, “the only international gate for three and a half million Palestinians living in the West Bank.” On a bare stage with nothing more than a microphone, Shehada effectively painted a scene of chaos and misery at the bridge –the uniquely awful “bridge flies. They come into your eyes and ears, in your mouth.”; the endless bureaucracy; “ Please prepare your passport, the white card, the green card, the ID, and your GD money,” a Palestinian policeman says to the line.

These (one-man) crowd scenes are Interspersed with voiceovers that provide historical context: At one point, we hear General Edmund Allenby recount his conversation in 1917 with British Prime Minister Lloyd George: “Allenby, I want Jerusalem as a Christmas present.”

But Shehada’s  perspective is more often communicated sardonically, in the mouth of one of his characters, such as this take on the West Bank settlers as they ride together: “ Every time a country recognized us as Palestinians, they built a new settlement. Look, the one on your left now, that settlement was built after the Spanish recognized us. The one we just passed behind us, that was built after the British recognized us. If any of you go to Europe, tell them: Stop recognizing us.”