Emma Gibson

I am a British theatre-maker, now living in Philadelphia, PA. I am currently working on my 4th full length play. I have worked in theatre my whole life, and have an academic background including a MA in creative and critical writing. I have worked as an actress and I was the founding producing artistic director of Tiny Dynamite (www.tinydynamite.org). My first play, Water In My Hands, was selected for The Philadelphia Women’s Theatre Festival (2018), Spooky Action Theatre (DC) New Plays in Development Series (2019) and The Liz Smith Reading Series with Miranda Theatre Company at The Cherry Lane in NYC. My second full length play, WHEN WE FALL was selected for the 2020 PlayPenn Conference and was a finalist for Premiere Stages at Keane 2020, a finalist for Kitchen Dog’s New Works Festival 2020 and a semi-finalist for the O‘Neill New Play Conference 2020. It was also on the longlist for The International Award with Theatre 503 in the UK and a top 100 for the Verity Bargate Award with Soho Theatre.

Most recently, my short ‘A Dog is a Creature of a Nose’ was selected for The Impossible play cycle with Spooky Action in November 2020.

As a writer I am interested in exploring aspects of the human condition such as loneliness, grief and forgiveness whilst juxtaposing the intimacy of these investigations, with bold design, poetic language and the wonder of magic realism. I am interested in complex structure and form and characters who are unpredictable or who make unexpected choices. I am greatly affected by my nationality (British) and how it feels to be displaced geographically and notice that a recurring theme in my plays is the sense of not fitting in (there are days when I feel like a bird in the wrong nest). I like to use three key ingredients in all of my plays: honesty, humor and magic.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.britishemma.com
FB: https://www.facebook.com/emma.gibson.7967
TW: emmagibson24
IG: emmagibson24

MORE ABOUT ME
I saw a production of Red Eye de Havre de Grace by Thaddeus Phillips and it was so thrilling, both the storytelling and the visual effects, that I physically could not leave the theatre afterwards. I wanted to absorb that moment forever. And I realized that this was the kind of theatre I wanted to try to make. The kind of theatre that changes the way you see and experience the world.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I am re-drafting a play that I wrote during lockdown and I have begun imagining a new full length play.

KEYWORDS
Equality, Climate, Poetry, Magic Realism, Humor, Tragedy, Normal People in extraordinary situations