Over the course of last season, I had the pleasure of hosting a group of playwrights (over zoom) every Sunday afternoon from September until May for The Playwrights’ Circle, a program supported by Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre and The University of Alberta’s Drama Department. I cannot take credit for the program’s inception as The Playwrights’ Circle was begun in 2014 by another playwright, Colleen Murphy, during her time at the University as the Lee Playwright-In-Residence and continued by playwright Meg Braem during her residency in 2017. I followed in Colleen and Meg’s footsteps and I am very glad to have had the opportunity to continue the Circle. The goal of The Playwrights’ Circle was to serve the needs and interests of Edmonton writers as they created and developed their new plays.

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.