A woman with blonde hair tied in a messy ponytail, smiling, standing outdoors in a garden with green foliage and sunlight.

Emily O’Brien-Brown

Director

I’m drawn to theatre shaped by bodies and voices in space, where performance, rhythm, clarity, and ritual orchestrate tension and release.

My work is actor-centric and process-driven, grounded in charged texts, careful dramaturgy, and a strong sense of audience relationship.

I aim to create performances that are entertaining and implicating, emotionally demanding and alive with the belief that change is possible.

Contact
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. - Alice Birch
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Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. - Alice Birch

Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. is a blistering examination of language and power. Through sharp, surreal, and darkly funny vignettes, it twists words into weapons and turns everyday rituals inside out. What begins as an assault on the language and traditions that have shaped “womanhood” becomes something larger: a call to tear down the systems of oppression that divide and diminish us all.

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Everybody - Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
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Everybody - Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Everybody is a modern riff on the 15th-century morality play Everyman, intellectually daring, wildly funny, and deeply moving. When Death shows up unannounced, Everybody must embark on a surreal, soul-searching journey through life’s biggest questions.

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FLICK - Madelaine Nunn
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FLICK - Madelaine Nunn

FLICK is a darkly comic exploration of life, death, and the risky, messy choices we make along the way. Flick, a palliative care nurse, blurs the boundaries between care and desire when she becomes entangled with Mark, a patient with cancer who challenges her sense of responsibility and control.

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Constellations - Nick Payne
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Constellations - Nick Payne

Constellations explores love, grief, and the infinite possibilities of choice through the lives of Marianne and Roland. For this graduating production, I reimagined the play for a cast of nine, deconstructing and stitching together 15 distinct universes. Sharing roles across the ensemble allowed each actor to explore facets of the characters, revealing how small decisions ripple through identity, relationships, and existence.

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Donor - Julia Grace
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Donor - Julia Grace

Donor is a dark comedy about ambition, inertia, and the tension between wanting to do everything and doing nothing. Directing Julia Grace in this one-woman show, I focused on rhythm, precision, and shared imagination, creating a space where a single performer could make multiple environments and characters fully present. It’s funny, sharp, and quietly devastating.

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Heroes of the Fourth Turning - Will Arbery
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Heroes of the Fourth Turning - Will Arbery

Heroes of the Fourth Turning explored devotion, delusion, and the collision of generational and ideological divides. Set at a late-night reunion in rural Wyoming, it follows four young conservatives navigating loyalty, ambition, and faith as the bonds that hold them together threaten to unravel.

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Where I Was Last Found - Vidya Rajan
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Where I Was Last Found - Vidya Rajan

Where I Was Last Found offered a glimpse into queer intimacy against a speculative, unsettled world. Tender moments of connection and separation unfold alongside a live score by Duel Native, which we deconstructed and elevated into a character of its own—an all-seeing presence observing the shifting borders of love, identity, and uncertainty. The play examines youth, possibility, and the quiet heartbreak of discovering the limits of both.

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Response to Genesis - Vidya Rajan
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Response to Genesis - Vidya Rajan

Response to Genesis was staged as a darkly comic examination of ageing, ambition, and the performance of relevance. Set in the private space of an imagined late-night interview, the piece explores how fantasy and nostalgia become forms of escape, and how imagination, once a gift, can turn on you. Through fractured celebrity language and ritualised self-mythologising, the work interrogates what it means to age in a culture obsessed with youth, affirmation, and endless reinvention.

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Proof - David Auburn
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Proof - David Auburn

Proof offered an opportunity to explore the mythology of genius and the generational cost of extraordinary minds. Framed within the rigorous world of pure mathematics, the play traces the thin line between brilliance and madness, ambition and collapse. I approached the work as a study of inheritance—not just of talent, but of expectation, doubt, and the quiet sacrifices made by those orbiting genius.

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Cowboy Mouth - Patti Smith and Sam Shepard
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Cowboy Mouth - Patti Smith and Sam Shepard

My first directed work, Cowboy Mouth was staged as a meditation on a generation searching for a saviour through rock and roll.

Written by Patti Smith and Sam Shepard as they passed a typewriter back and forth, in the aftermath of losing cultural and political icons—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy—the play captures a moment defined by grief, disillusionment, and longing.

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