Emil’s wide-ranging works for the stage, page and screen have been honoured at home and internationally and translated into French, Italian, Hebrew, Slovak, Russian, Japanese, Turkish, Danish, and Indonesian.
Emil’s stage work for the young and the once-were-young include Mourning Dove, Bluenose, Derailed, The Book of Ashes and Beneath the Banyan Tree. “St. Louis was a better place simply because this play was happening here,” a critic wrote of the U.S. premiere of Hana’s Suitcase, a celebrated adaptation of the beloved Holocaust book by Karen Levine.
His stage adaptation of Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon was a Dora Mavor Moore Award finalist for Outstanding New Play. The Toronto premiere at Crow’s Theatre was honoured as one of the Top Ten Productions of 2018 by The Globe and Mail and selected by former critic Robert Cushman as one of his Personal Bests from a Decade Theatre (2010-2019).
Emil’s first crack at a musical was writing the libretto and co-writing the lyrics for The Hockey Sweater: A Musical, based on Roch Carrier’s classic story. He worked with composer/lyricist Jonathan Monro and director Donna Feore on an acclaimed adaptation that premiered at the Segal Centre (2017), followed by a run at the NAC in 2018.
As playwright in residence at Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, Emil began his latest work-in-progress, an adaptation of By Chance Alone, Max Eisen’s acclaimed memoir. He co-wrote, with director Tasha Hubbard, the screenplay for Meadowlarks, a feature film about the Sixties Scoop that will premiere as a Special Presentation at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.
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