Bill Cissna
Bill wrote non-fiction and fiction in high school, then newspaper articles and some awful play scripts in college. Since college, he has written non-fiction of all kinds -- magazine articles, brochures, press releases, publicity -- in advertising, public relations and freelance positions from the late '70s through 2004. In fiction, short stories and two novels were created and published. A much deeper...
Bill wrote non-fiction and fiction in high school, then newspaper articles and some awful play scripts in college. Since college, he has written non-fiction of all kinds -- magazine articles, brochures, press releases, publicity -- in advertising, public relations and freelance positions from the late '70s through 2004. In fiction, short stories and two novels were created and published. A much deeper theater involvement, started in 2002, led to his first full-length play in 2006. His wife is an actress and stage manager, now retired from work, while his son holds a masters' degree in theater lighting and is in the theater department at the University of Maryland. So theater involvement was kind of inevitable.
His first two full-lengths, "Conversations in a Cafe" and "All About Faith," have been staged in local productions, and self-published (available in print on Amazon.com). Full-length comedy "Rehearsals" saw its first production in August, 2019 (print scripts at Amazon.com), and is scheduled for two full productions in North Carolina, in May and July, 2023. Other full-lengths include "The Good Life" and "Reunions." He has a 90-minute adaptation of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," produced by Kernersville Little Theatre in 2018. "The Prince and the Pauper" (Twain) and "Much Ado About Nothing" (Shakespeare) are other adaptations. "Patent" is a long one-act.
He has also had a number of 10-minute plays produced. From them, "Communication Gap" has been produced 11 times and published in Best 10-Minutes Plays of 2014 (Smith & Kraus). His self-published "Collected Short Plays" (2017) has led to additional productions. His latest project, a 1-hour script called "The Blue Death," was streamed online by The Little Theatre of Winston-Salem in late November, 2020.
From late 2015 until May, 2022, he also wrote preview articles and some reviews of theater productions for the Winston-Salem (NC) Journal.