For just over a year, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Heather Inglis and Workshop West, Playwrights’ Theatre in workshopping and developing a new work of mine. Given our current reality, this means we’ve done a lot of work online; a lot of workshops over ‘zoom’ or meetings over google hangouts or equivalent. I’ll be honest, I had no idea what zoom was over a year ago. Now it’s become a sort of standard for official meetings. All this has left me wondering: What happened to you skype? How did you drop the ball so hard…?

But for real, the state of live theatre during these COVID times has been a whole thing. The whole concept of ‘live’ or ‘in-person’ has been just south of impossible for more than a year. And it means the whole process of ‘developing’ or ‘workshopping’ a new work feels radically different. For starters there are some benefits: I’m at home, and oftentimes I may be wearing a nice shirt but I’m always in sweatpants. But it brings a lot of challenges as well.

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