Emma Durbin

Bio

My works in development include: landscape (workshopped at Mirrorbox Theatre and The Theatre School at DePaul University, 2022 Premiere Play Festival semi-finalist, 2023 NAP Series at Normal Ave finalist, and 2023 LAB Series at The Inkwell Theater finalist), Witchcraft, Bitchcraft (2022 commission by Pocket Theatre VR), and overgrown (winter 2023 Jackalope Playwrights Lab). My short plays have been presented by Chicago Dramatists, Shattered Globe Theatre, Naked Angels, Westmont College, Western Washington University, and DePaul University.

I am a co-founder and lead artistic producer for Freshly Brewed at The Understudy and a writer for Rescripted.org. I have served on dramaturgy teams for new play workshops and readings at Actors Theatre of Louisville, TimeLine Theatre Company, The Story Theatre, and more! I am also a script reader for Playwrights Center and The Playwrights Realm.

About My Plays

As an early-career genderqueer playwright, my work centers women and people who are experiencing gender marginalization, and the bonds we form in search of survival, community, and joy. I write characters who yearn for love and communion, with a diversity of bodies, ages, and racial experiences.

When I write, I reach into the space between reality and fantasy, poetry, and naturalism, crafting intimate stories about queerness, care, and belonging.

My plays weave in and out of different timelines, with landscape exploring queer rock climbing experiences in 2019 and 1908, and Of Our Own recounting a character’s repressed sexual trauma through their poetry. I write to imagine a better future through the lens of our past. 

With a focus on agency and empowerment, I write the revolutions that I want to make irresistible. In landscape, the characters embark on a personal and collective journey to become their most authentic selves, while fighting for a more just and compassionate world. In a newer work, Witchcraft, Bitchcraft, two teenage girls use magic to demand witness to their rage as they claim their space in the world.

My plays ask: what do we crave from each other? What do we owe ourselves? And how, in all these marginalized identities, are we showing up for one another in our spaces? 

About My Dramaturgy

As a dramaturg, I am passionate about new work, plays about math and science, and as I grew up in Ashland, Oregon and have seen more than 25 Shakespeare plays in production. I am a lover of plays that draw from personal experiences as well as from history and literary classics to further understand the human condition, adaptations like Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice and Luis Alfaro’s Mojada. I love theatre that surprises. Opens me to a new idea. Theatre that makes me feel less alone. What I love most about theatre is its ability to perform magic. The world of a play has different rules than that of the outside world. On a stage, a crumpled up paper can be a dog, a shadow can be a child, and a parachute of silk can be an ocean. There are important stories that need telling. Stories that we’ll never know about until we read them.

I am an analytical thinker and a textually grounded creative risk taker. But I also love to have fun and get the team on our feet. At DePaul, I dramaturged a production of Sarah Treem’s THE HOW AND THE WHY, directed by MFA director, Mallory Metoxen. The play follows two narratives; the reunion of a young woman, Rachel, with her birth mother, Zelda, and the development of a scientific hypothesis that women menstruate as a defense against the toxicity of sperm. The production team was entirely women and I thrived in researching, conversing about, and creating activities surrounding science and menstruation. My actor packet for this production included a timeline spanning from 1889 to 2011, focusing on the world of the play and histories of feminism, male disgust and the female body in advertisements, breast cancer, and scientific theories. Later in the rehearsal process when I noticed the actors were still confused about the science of the play, I brought in my own scientific hypothesis based on what I learned in my research: “Menstruation as a defense against Estrogen Hypothesis.” I guided them through a debate using strategy cards. They each picked cards and used those strategies to challenge my hypothesis.

Education

I interned at the Goodman Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Ashland New Plays Festival.

I attended the New Play Dramaturgy Intensive at the Kennedy Center with Mark Bly.

Playwriting BFA: The Theatre School at DePaul University (2020, Dean’s Prize Recipient, magna cum laude).

I am currently available for freelance dramaturgy.