

“The teacher has young kids and her relationship falls apart through the course of the play, so she ends up single-parenting and teaching and isolating, so her life gets thrown into chaos.”
#Theme hospital zoom out series#
John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven, Kevin Kerr’s play Unity (1918), the video game The Last of Us Part Two and the Netflix documentary series Tiger King. The play she wrote, titled Zoom Lens, is about a university professor teaching a new class called Cultural Representations of Pandemics, which requires eight students to break into four teams to explore Emily St. The pandemic has found us being welcomed into strangers' bedrooms via Zoom. It seems like that’s where the drama is.”

Because we actually are living our lives through technology. So it just seemed like an opportunity to double down on that and create a place that lives in Zoom.

“They had described this world that we are actually living in right now. “So I went through these notes and it blew my mind. “I had completely forgotten what had happened in our workshop because of my accident,” she says. Patterson ended up leaving the hospital 10 days earlier than planned, because she was worried domestic flights would be grounded and she’d be stuck in an Ontario hospital during a pandemic.Īfter a period of recuperation, Patterson returned to the notes she took from her encounters with the theatre students and was amazed to find them shockingly pertinent to the pandemic moment. “I had to have surgery and go into rehab and while I was in rehab, the pandemic started,” she recalls. For log-in info, go to wfp.to/zoomlensShe was participating in a workshop in Toronto when she fell and broke her hip she was forced to stay in the city for a month. Patterson, who has used a wheelchair off and on since she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999, was obliged to stay in one after suffering an accident in early 2020. “What they described was a Zoom call,” Patterson says.
#Theme hospital zoom out windows#
“And there was also this talk of windows - feeling like you’re inside looking out through a window and feeling like everyone was in their little box. “They described feeling like they were isolated, feeling like they were living in little boxes, feeling like they were interacting with the world through their computers,” Patterson recalls. Patterson says she asked the students: “What is the world that you feel like you’re living in right now?” “So we did this series of workshops and one of the things we talked about was the world of the play.” “They were interested in something that would excite them to perform,” Patterson says in a phone interview. We’ve watched readings and plays delivered via Zoom, to various degrees of successīut it struck actor/playwright Debbie Patterson (Sargent & Victor & Me, How it Ends) that Zoom was a good metaphor of life in the 21st century, although it did not occur to her when she began workshopping her way through a play she was commissioned to write for theatre students at the University of Manitoba.Īctor/playwright Debbie Patterson was commissioned to write for theatre students at the University of Manitoba. The online video-conferencing app Zoom is one of the digital tools we’ve seen used to fill the void, alongside digital streaming. Though theatres have largely disappeared from our lives since COVID-19 shut them down a year ago, actors gotta act. This article was published (576 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
