Callie Kimball

Callie Kimball is an award-winning, New England-based playwright.

Her absurdist two-hander Things That Are Round was a finalist for the Woodward/Newman Drama Award, has been produced in Chicago, Boston, and Baltimore, and will enjoy its West Coast premiere at CapStage in 2027.

Her new incredibly dark, incredibly relevant comedy, Show Me Any Heaven (a sequel to Dreams of the Penny Gods) recently had a reading at Portland Stage. The play takes place in the Catskills over Labor Day weekend 2026, where three desperately competitive MFA students have retreated to cook up their thesis ideas, manipulate, judge, and sleep with each other, and consider what it means to be a writer at this particular moment in history.

She’s also working on an untitled solo show (tentatively titled Rock, Paper, Scissors) with director Sean Daniels of Recovery Arts Project about her late father’s artwork and relationship to addiction.

Her play Sofonisba, about the remarkable work and life of 16th-century painter Sofonisba Anguissola, made the 2016 Kilroys’ List after receiving Honorable Mentions in 2014 and 2015. The play won the Clauder Gold Prize, was a finalist for the Princess Grace Award, and also Shakespeare’s Sister Award. It has been produced by Dramatic Rep, Washington Stage Guild, and Theater at Monmouth, where it enjoyed its world premiere under the direction of Dawn McAndrews.

Her 90-minute comedy about reparations, Alligator Road, is set in a yarn-bombed hardware store. It’s been produced in Portland and Boston, and won a Broadway World Critic’s Choice Award before enjoying a pandemic reading at MCC Theater, starring Julianna Margulies, directed by Thomas Sadoski.

Her verse play Lucrece and the Two Janes is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Rape of Lucrece,” and was written in three days as an emergency replacement for a canceled production of King Lear at Washington Shakespeare Company.

In 2019, Portland Stage commissioned her play Perseverance to commemorate the centennial of women’s suffrage. The play had readings at the Little Festival of the Unexpected, starring April Matthis, and at Ashland New Play Festival. It was produced in 2021 at Portland Stage, directed by Jade King Carroll.

While in grad school at Hunter College, she won the Rita and Burton Goldberg Prize twice, once for her Yukon Gold Rush play Rush (which had its world premiere in New York at LaMama ETC) and again for her play Dreams of the Penny Gods, which premiered in Chicago.

Several of her plays have finaled or semifinaled for the O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, Clubbed Thumb Biennial Award, Kitchen Dog New Works Festival, the Leah Ryan Boost Award, NY Innovative Theater Award, Seacoast Spotlight Award, and a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, among others.

She has received commissions from Portland Stage, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Washington Shakespeare Company, Phoenix Theatre DC, Shadowcatcher Productions, and The In Series, who commissioned and produced a new translation of Mozart’s The Impresario that was later produced in Trinidad and Tobago. She has also received generous funding for her plays from Bates College, Middlebury College, and the Brooks Family Foundation.

Her plays have been produced at Portland Stage, Rep Stage, Cap Stage, The Brick, Greater Boston Stage Company, Washington Shakespeare Company, Washington Stage Guild, Project Y Theatre, Mad Horse Theatre, Theatre L’Acadie, Halcyon Theatre, Dramatic Rep, Theatre at Monmouth, Team Awesome Robot, The Players’ Ring, Boston University, Bowdoin College, Hunter College, FRIGID Festival, DC Fringe, Hollywood Fringe, PortFringe, Drama League’s DirectorFest, and DC Dollies and the Rocket Bitch Revue, among others. A few films of her short plays are floating around the internet.

Additionally, her plays have been read or developed at the Kennedy Center, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Kitchen Dog Theatre, Echo Theatre, The Road Theatre Company (with Jim Beaver and Lee Meriwether), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Ashland New Plays Festival, Lost Girls Theatre, Lunar Energy Productions, and Electric Pear Productions, among others.

Scholarly articles about her plays have been published in Comedia Performance: A Journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater (Sofonisba) and in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (Lucrece and the Two Janes).

Interviews with Callie appear in American Theatre Magazine as well as in Thriving as an Adjunct: Keys to Success for Part-time Faculty, due from Bloomsbury Publishing in March 2027. She has written short nonfiction for NPR and The Dramatist, and her work has been anthologized by Tripwire Harlot, The Kilroys, and Theatre Communications Group. She has also been interviewed on several podcasts, including American Theatre’s “The Subtext,” Halcyon Theatre’s “Moment to Moment,” “The Family Room,” and Ashland New Play Festival’s “Play4Keeps.”

Until its closing in 2021, the Lark Play Development Center was her artistic home. She workshopped over a half dozen plays there, was in Playwrights’ Week (Dreams of the Penny Gods), and was part of several retreats, including the Vassar Summer Retreat, Winter Writers’ Retreat, and Meeting of the Minds. Actors who worked on her plays include Michelle Wilson, Heidi Schreck, April Matthis, Marin Ireland, Eva Kaminsky, and Heidi Armbruster.

She teaches Playwriting and Literature at Middlebury College. She has also taught or guest lectured at King’s College London Shakespeare Centre, the ACS International School in London, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Bates College, Colby College, Bowdoin College, National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, Maryland Shakespeare Festival, Maine College of Art, Maine Playwrights Festival, and elsewhere. Many of her students enjoy success in the fields of film, television, and playwriting.

She started out as a classical actor and movement instructor before turning to playwriting. She studied at the Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive, and was the movement coach for the world premiere of Ariel Dorfman’s Picasso’s Closet. She began her education career began as a teaching artist bringing playwriting and Shakesepare into public schools and lockdown residential facilities, and has taught well over 1,000 students of all ages.

She earned her MFA in Playwriting at Hunter College under the direction of Tina Howe. While in grad school, she worked as a project and production manager at NBCUniversal in New York for several years, and also studied at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, an Affiliate Writer at The Playwrights’ Center, and former Resident Playwright at Theater at Monmouth.

She is a proud member of SAG-AFTRA and The Dramatists Guild.

Her themes range from historical dramas (Sofonisba, Perseverance, Rush) and classical adaptations (Lucrece and the Two Janes, The Impresario, Cows of War) to dark comedies (Things That Are Round, Show Me Any Heaven, Dreams of the Penny Gods, MAY 39th, Jenny1538). Many of her plays explore emotional violence and parasitic relationships, with characters who live at the intersection of language and power, and struggle to break free from the constraints of class, race, gender, and systemic abuse. 

Some have described her plays as feminist, which is lovely, but really she just writes plays where the main characters have jobs and goals and happen to be women.  

Callie’s interview on American Theatre’s Subtext podcast.

Callie on the New Play Exchange

Callie on the Playwrights' Center