What could have been done to thwart President Lincoln’s assassination in Ford’s Theatre? Richard Hellesen tackles that question in his award-winning one-act play “One Destiny” starring Stephen F. Schmidt as Harry Ford and Michael Bunce as actor Harry Hawk.

Ford was one of the brothers who owned theaters up and down the East Coast, none more successful than the one in Washington. Hawk was the leading man in the show on that fateful night, the only person onstage when John Wilkes Booth jumped down from the balcony after shooting the president. Hellesen examines the accounts of these main characters and remarks from several other bystanders. The first of these was Harry Ford.