Emily Ball Cicchini

Emily Ball Cicchini

Emily is a published and award-winning playwright with an interest in historical, literary, and imaginative subjects. Her plays Edward, the Owl, and the Calico Cat and Like a Metaphor are published by Dramatic and YouthPlays, respectively. Her play Becoming Brontë won several local and national awards. She edited the Mother/Daughter Monologues for the International Centre for Women Playwrights (ICWP) Press, and...
Emily is a published and award-winning playwright with an interest in historical, literary, and imaginative subjects. Her plays Edward, the Owl, and the Calico Cat and Like a Metaphor are published by Dramatic and YouthPlays, respectively. Her play Becoming Brontë won several local and national awards. She edited the Mother/Daughter Monologues for the International Centre for Women Playwrights (ICWP) Press, and appears in Scenes from a Diverse World. The Pollyanna Theatre Company, where she is playwright in residence, has commissioned and produced over a dozen plays for youth audiences, including A Christmas Rose, A Dragon’s Happy Day, Just Bee, and the Pattern Nation series. She taught creative writing, acting, directing, voice, movement, and arts integration from pre-school to post-graduate levels in both formal and community based settings across the country. She was a radio commentator on Public Radio International’s “Primary Sources" and a two-time Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting finalist. She holds a MFA from the University of Texas at Austin where she was a Michener Fellow, and a BFA in Acting from Goodman School of Drama in Chicago. She also holds a PhD in organizational communication and technology from Moody College of Communication and serves as executive director for BookSpring in Austin, Texas.

Plays

  • Becoming Brontë
    One summer in the early lives of the authors of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and the Tenant of Wildfell Hall. a young man named William Weightman comes to study at their isolated Yorkshire parsonage home. Weightman's intoxicating presence inspires their burning passions and forever changes Anne, Charlotte, and Emily — but can he live up to men of their dreams?
  • A Christmas Rose
    It is Christmas Eve, 1944, in Normandy, France. After an air raid, studious Jacques and brave Jeanette are separated from their mother, and take refuge in an abandoned Cathedral. As the lonely night wears on, they are visited by a saint, a gargoyle, and mysterious others. With a little help, they find new hope for the future and a perfect gift on Christmas Morning.
  • Just Bee
    What happens to neighboring beehives when the rains don’t come and the flowers don’t bloom and the bees can’t make enough honey for their hives? In this fanciful yet powerful new play, two proud queen bees, each with very different management styles, must work together (with the help of a solitary blue orchard bee) to discover new ways of solving old problems so that everyone in the garden can thrive.
  • (The Mystical Meeting of) Mays & Terese
    Saint Mother Teresa was easily one of the most beloved figures of our times: TIME dubbed Madalyn Murray O'Hair — the founder of American Atheists — "the most hated woman in America." These women changed the world — at great personal cost. What if "Mays" and "Terese" had known and influenced each other?
  • The Good Ladies Book
    As poet, novelist, and editress of one of the first ladies' magazines, Godey's Ladies Book, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale influences the reading, learning, economic and political consciousness of women across early America. As The Civil War begins, Hale campaigns for Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Hale's struggle between career and motherhood is at once contemporary and extraordinary.
  • The Other Mother
    A daughter faces pressure to be first chair in a affluent high school orchestra. Her top competition is her best friend, who happens to be the daughter of the orchestra teacher. When the other girl wins, jealousy and sickness come to light, and the girl's darkest dreams and premonitions come true.