Victor Wishna is a husband, father, author, editor, playwright, and commentator, among other things. As a dramatist (and comedist), he has composed nearly a dozen plays, several of which have been staged in multiple time zones.

Victor’s newest works include First Generation, commissioned by Spinning Tree Theatre (Kansas City, MO) for a world-premiere production in April 2025, and The Dreidel Players Present…Best Hanukkah Show Ever!, which premiered in Kansas City and New York City in December 2024, and has been published by Dramatists Play Service in 2025. Tree of Life toured nationally with the Jewish Plays Project and debuted at The White Theatre (Overland Park, KS) in September 2024. His short play Thank You for Meeting Me Here, about students confronting antisemitism, is currently touring high schools in the Kansas City area and beyond.

His upcoming plays include The Old Man’s War, which has been commissioned by History Theatre (St. Paul, MN) for a debut staged reading in October 2025.

His play DNR has been produced at The Living Room Theatre in Kansas City, and was named a semi-finalist in the Blue Ink Playwriting Competition at the American Blues Theater in Chicago. His first full-length play, Shearwater, was selected as a winner of the Panndora’s Box Festival of New Works in Long Beach, Calif., and a finalist in Playhouse on the Square’s New Works @ The Works Playwriting Competition in Memphis.

Victor has also written extensively about theatre, and is the author of In Their Company: Portraits of American Playwrights (Umbrage Editions, 2006), a collection of his interviews with 61 prominent stage writers from Edward Albee to August Wilson, which won an Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal. He served as the inaugural artistic director for the Midwest Dramatists Center, a regional playwright incubator based in Kansas City. A graduate of Stanford University and the New School’s creative writing MFA program, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Miami Herald, and other major publications, and is a regular contributor to KC Studio and KCUR-FM, Kansas City’s NPR affiliate. In 2010, Victor was named New York’s second-funniest amateur Jewish comedian by The Jewish Week. Seriously. He lives in Leawood, Kansas, with his wife, Annie, and their two brilliant and perfectly behaved children.