Emma Durbin

Chicago-based Playwright, Dramaturg, and Producer

UPCOMING PROJECTS

SAVE THE DATE CHICAGO:  landscape reading: February 24 & March 4, 2025, dir, Joel Willison, with Theatre L'Acadie at Facility Theatre. Tickets available HERE!

About Me

My works in development include: landscape (workshopped at Mirrorbox Theatre and Valdez Theatre Conference, 2022 Premiere Play Festival semi-finalist, 2024 Irons in the Fire at Fault Line Theatre semifinalist, 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 also a co-founder and lead artistic producer for Freshly Brewed, a new play development series for emerging Chicago writers hosted by The Understudy Coffee and Books.

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, and I am a script reader for Playwrights Center and The Playwrights Realm.

About My Work

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? 

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 (Dean’s Prize Recipient, magna cum laude).

I am currently available for freelance dramaturgy and script consultations.