Christian Wilburn: 2025 Hitchcock Christmas Playwright Interview

Welcome to the fourth installment of our Playwright Spotlight series – Holiday Edition! Today we’re featuring PlayGround alum and People’s Choice favroite Christian Wilburn and his play Dial M for Merry (Inspired by Dial M for Murder), one of five plays being presented as a part of PlayGround’s 4th annual A Very Hitchcock Christmas, running at Potrero Stage and Simulcast, December 6-7 at 7pm.  Advance reservations are required: visit playground-sf.org/hitchcockchristmas for details.

What was the impetus for your Hitchcockian/Christmas mash-up?
I loved an idea of Dial M for Murder where the victim or killer was Santa himself! I thought it was the right amount of silly and twisted to capture the Hitchcock spirit.

Give a teaser for your play.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year…for murder!

Did you start writing any other scripts before you submitted that one?
Yes! I tried other stabs at the Dial M/Christmas mash-up. It proved to be a very difficult script to crack. The original Dial M is so based on seeing every aspect of the murder and the ensuing investigation, it was difficult to capture that spirit in ten minutes. I think this version, while outwardly simple took a lot of thought and planning to make work.

Can you imagine a 2-hour version of your play? What might that look like?
Certainly! The hardest part of this play was making it work in ten minutes. The two hour version would explore deeper aspects of the characters and the crime.

What’s your favorite film? Tell us what you love about it!
Drive My Car by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. A film about connection and making art in the aftermath of grief. It’s a movie that’s mostly people having under stated conversations, but it’s so alive and captivating, because of the pathos of its characters.

If you could pick the next iconic director/holiday mash-up as a prompt for PlayGround, what would your combination be? Tell us why!
Spielberg or Kurosawa. Other iconic film-makers with long careers and plenty of classics.

What artists (theatre or non-theatre, other than Alfred Hitchcock) inspired you as you wrote this play? Or more generally?
Well I was watching the two Knives Out films as I wrote this piece. I studied the way they worked.

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Christian Wilburn is a biracial writer and educator, who’s spent his life in San Francisco. Christian creates stories that are simultaneously diverse, fantastical, and radically empathetic. His short plays have been featured in festivals around the country. Christian is also a five-time Monday Night Playground People’s Choice Award winner and winner of the inaugural Best of Playground People’s Choice Award. His full-length play, Starlight, received a developmental production at the 2023 Playground New Works Festival. His play Love_Stories received a world premiere as a part of the Santa Clara University mainstage season in 2019.

A VERY HITCHCOCK CHRISTMAS was created from submission by playwright alumni in each of PlayGround’s four regions (SF, LA, NYC, and Chicago). Over the last three years, A VERY HITCHCOCK CHRISTMAS reached nearly 2,500 audience members, in person and online. The 2025 production includes two audience favorites from previous years, The Birds is Coming by Jonathan Josephson from 2024 and How the Bates (Almost) Stole Christmas by J.S. Puller from 2023; and three world premiere short plays: Dial M for Merry by Christian Wilburn, Fool Proof by Kimberly Ridgeway, and Shadow of an Uncle Nick by Mark Sherstinsky. The plays are in conversation with the Hitchcock films The Birds, Psycho, Dial M for Murder, Strangers on a Train, and Shadow of a Doubt. Visit playground-sf.org/hitchcockchristmas for details.