After more than a decade, Emily Bohannon, a graduate of the Juilliard Playwrights Program, finally got to see her play, The Fiancé, for the first time on stage. The opportunity came via a world premiere at Iowa City’s Riverside Theatre, which capped Riverside’s 2025-2026 season with a run of performances led by two of the theaters founders, Jody Hovland and Ron Clark.
LV sat down with the playwright and screenwriter, who is “dedicated to finding the deep humanity in complicated people.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What has it been like to be on a 10-year journey with The Fiancé and finally get to see it open?
It’s actually been 13 years … this is definitely the longest it’s taken for a play that I’ve written to see the stage. I wrote this play initially when I was a student at the Juilliard Playwrights Program. I had had a broken engagement and felt like I was never going to love again. And, shortly thereafter, my boss’s mom, who was 85, got engaged to a man at her retirement home. They were doing all this stuff and going on all these adventures, and I was like, OK, maybe there’s hope after all. I wanted to put these two women in a play together. It’s very rare to see a play about that season of life, and a play in which an older character is the protagonist.
How has the play changed from draft one to what audiences saw at the Riverside Theatre production?
The biggest change is that there’s a different character. So this play is about three generations of women, all of whom have just experienced a significant loss of love, one widowed, one divorced and one broken engagement. In the original draft of the play, the youngest character was engaged. There were two sets of fiancés in the play. What I found at the first reading that I did with [Riverside Theatre Artistic Director Adam Knight] was, for me, it was too much fiancé for one play.
The show is incredibly funny. Three lines in there were belly laughs. Why drive a story inherently about different types of grief with humor?
One of my major mentors is the playwright Chris Durang. Anybody who knows Chris Durang’s work knows that it is incredibly funny, and incredibly painful. It wasn’t a deliberate choice for this to be a comedy. Although I’m also Southern, and Southerners put the fun in funeral. There’s just this natural humor in dealing with the hardest parts of life. That is part of the air I breathe and the water I swim in.
What advice do you have for young playwrights? What would you want them to know about getting an idea to production?
My number-one [piece] of advice that I give to young people is to really build your network through people your age. When you’re young, you think, “I have to find some decision-maker who’s older than me, who’s in a different generation, who’s fancier than me.” Almost all of the really good opportunities I’ve had, not only in theater, but in film and television, have 100 percent come from my peers and people my age. This play is a perfect example of that because I met Adam in 2005. And we were friends for many, many years, and that friendship is the basis of our artistic collaboration.
One of the most valuable things you can do to be a good friend to your peers is to show up for them, to go to their readings, to show up for their show, to keep track of what they’re doing and really use that community as you make your own art. That’s what’s going to see you through emotionally, and in terms of your work getting seen and done.
In Act 2 of The Fiancé the women at the center of the show watch The Bridges of Madison County. Is that an Iowa shoutout? Was that always meant to be the movie they watch?
It was always The Bridges of Madison County because one of my teachers at Julliard, Marsha Norman, one of our great American playwrights and musical theater book writers, was writing the book for the musical of The Bridges of Madison County when I was in school. So it’s an absolute shoutout to her, and when we read this play in class, she punched her fists in the air so I just had to keep it in.
What else do you want people to know about you and your work?
Everyone keeps asking me, “why Riverside Theatre?” I’ve written this play with the hope that a community, ideally in the future, lots of communities, will form around this play. From the very moment I got [to Iowa City] for our workshop of the play two years ago the community has really embraced me and this play with open arms. I seriously have never worked with a group of people who, from the very first meetings, showed so much genuine love and respect and care for my work.
