A Bridge has two sides; this duo has two Bridges
written by the Moon Houston
Flyer for Robo Waitress Assassins. The art is really cool.
Usually I write the title before I write the essay to give myself and yourself (reader) a taste of what the structure will be. There isn’t much correlation with the title and the essay for this one, it’s all just facts!
Tilly Bridges and Susan Bridges are a writing duo (who I will call the Bridges) who have definitely worked on something you’ve seen before. Star Trek Voyager: Homecoming, Monster High, Star Trek Prodigy in television, and Long Away,their award winning short film in, well, film. Tilly has written a book (come on, I know you’ve seen a book before) Begin Transmission: The Trans Allegories of The Matrix, which is in my TBR!, and together the Bridges have a YA book coming out this summer, August 4th, 2026, to be exact: Just Another Summer, a queer trans romcom graphic novel. I’m gonna add it to my TBR before I upload this post!
If you’ve ever seen a pair of roller skates, maybe you’ve also seen the Bridges “enjoy strapping wheels to their feet and flinging themselves at other humans in roller derby.”
Joy Who Lived is all about amplifying trans stories. Along with the film writing and the play writing and the book writing and the tv writing, Tilly writes weekly essays about her story on her website, TillysTransTuesdays.com. You’ll probably see more of Tilly’s writing similar to this response when asked what’s the best thing about being trans: “That I can feel true joy now. That I can exist without having to put on an act, or a costume. That I got to put the pain of dysphoria away, and not let it drown me anymore, as I fly free in the clouds. It's... liberating.”
Now, I really wanna make the obvious pun, what with her last name being Bridges. But I will not make you answer my riddles three, I’m here reporting the facts. I’m here bridging the gap between audience and producer, if you will.
(Also, not to go off the rails but I did look up parts of a bridge to see if there were any good puns I could make. I got decked with the realization that I can’t. I can’t just pile puns into an article like that. I’m not a comedian in that sense, but the festival is full of comedians, so I don’t have to do that! No cap!)
A common theme in the Bridges resume is their clear love of sci-fi, no doubt abut-ments that (that’s my last pun I promise, and I’m not gonna apologize for it being bad). And they said so directly in their answers! “We're huge sci-fi fans, it’s the genre of our hearts. And the cyberpunk sub-genre is tailor made for stories about both bodily autonomy and the evils of capitalism, they're baked right into the definition. That made it the perfect venue for telling the story we wanted to tell, from a trans and queer perspective, about the things our society foists on us without our consent.”
And that leads us right into what Robo Waitress Assassins is all abut-ment (ehehe I lied earlier): “Robo Waitress Assassins is a cyberpunk action dramedy about the way society controls our bodily autonomy, and how it works to keep us financially insecure so that we're too anxious and exhausted to fight back. It's very anti-capitalist and is about how coming together to help each other is the only way we're going to be able to change things for the better.”
I’m a sucker for anything anti-capitalist, anything about community and the ways we can fight back, whether it’s something big or small, because the small acts are just as important and less noticed, and honestly, even though it might be freaky and may need to be analyzed by a Women and Gender Studies professor, but I love robots as a metaphor for women. Probably unrelated to the play, as I haven’t seen it yet, but I keep telling people that the push for AI and robotic house servants is just because they wanna bring back slavery. Some people get that without me having to explain it, some people don’t. And I would be happy to explain it if you don’t get it, but I’m already getting off the rails! (Okay, seriously, that’s the last one.)
Off the title alone I knew I’d love this play live reading. So hopefully you’ll love it too! The Bridges recommend Robo Waitress Assassins for anyone who is a fan of:
sci-fi
action with heart
comedy
drama
a tasty swirly mix of comedy and drama
as well as people who want to see:
broken people in a bad world find a way to fight to make things better
and of course, fans of anything
super trans
and
super gay
Robo Waitress Assassins will be at the Hudson Theater on Sunday, April 5th, 2026, showtime 12:30 pm. Tickets available at https://joywholived.com/events/robo-waitress-assassins-a-cyberpunk-action-dramedy-live-reading.