The creative process is never linear. As a company that programs a wide range of interdisciplinary works in our main stage season, the lead artists on our season shows often have intricate, unexpected, and sometimes unusual ways of collecting inspiration for and making the final works that audiences witness on stage.
To bring you closer to Buddies artists and their processes, we’re asking Buddies artists to tell us about their “process marginalia” — notes in margins, strokes of inspiration, and snippets of songs, films, books, and more that helped the work get made.
The Herald is an It Could Still Happen production in partnership with Buddies, on stage at Buddies March 4 – 14, 2026. In this iteration of process marginalia, Jill Connell, writer and director of The Herald, elaborates on the collaborative process of making a show about process and work. Read on for Jill’s generous creative unfolding.
1. Group Work
My friend Claudia Dey speaks about your current book being the antidote to the book that came before. The play that came before this one was a bilingual play told in quantum time that we produced in two warehouse spaces in two different cities. The team had very little sleep and very little money and everyone had way too many jobs on that show. I was told by a team member that we went far beyond what should have ever been allowed. And I believe that’s true. But I also don’t really know the rules of theatre. Or what rules make sense to follow. There’s this weird grey area for me, where art needs to cause discomfort in order to invent new shapes. Like, what are we allowed to ask of each other? In art, but also in life?
The choreographer Jonathan Burrows talks about artistic process being 98% figuring out how you’re going to work together and 2% working. With this play I really wanted to work on how we work together. I modeled our early workshop process on another workplace where I loved working, called Luna Café, that was so much about community and teamwork and physicality. We began working on this play as a team in 2019 under the pseudonym The Toronto Men’s Boxing Club, to create our own Principles for Work apart from the regulations set out in the actor’s union. Each day in rehearsal we try to be co-working: working on the play but also working on our lives.
Working on how we work means we ended up with a play about work. Our team’s 2019 selves look like babies in our video archives. It feels like that world is gone and those people are gone. Like we had to ghost our old selves and be like: How does everything work now? What are our labours now? What can we sustain, that will make us well? It feels like our “work” needs to become completely different now. And yet our history of work together is what makes everything possible.
As for producing theatre: this one very specific kind of work. We’ve been wondering how to avoid the common traps of urgency and scarcity, to see what other possibilities might exist. It’s been so fun to produce with Sascha Cole because we’ve been making shows together since 2015. We have such resilience and love for each other and also for how challenging this process has been at times.
2. The Greeks
I love the double-vision inherent in theatre of actor and character, real-life and pretend-world. In The Herald we are working with an overlay of ourselves right now and Ancient Greece. Several performers play Herakles, the hot demi-God who is lovers with the herald. We are all hot Greek men and we are all heralds and we are all ourselves. We have been using the word “ambivalence” a lot in rehearsal. Seeing if we can allow ourselves to be as changeable and sensitive as we are, while also following the map of the play.
3. Money
This project helped me understand that the harder I worked making art the less money I was going to have. This play has been a glorious amount of labour, for like, dozens of people, so it’s exciting to reach this pinnacle of un-money. I know money is really useful and it is irresponsible not to pursue it more actively. But it’s also a really excellent feeling not to fuck with capitalism.
There are so many rules about what you’re allowed to do with your own money. Which translates into all these rules about what you’re allowed to do with your own time. Like there’s a set amount of time you’re allowed to spend making one play. And I think the length of time we’ve spent making this play is supposed to be embarrassing, because of money? Conversely, if we had no money, we wouldn’t be able to pay artists and make this work. We are deeply grateful for this project’s funding and also for our partnership with Buddies.
Recently, it has been shared with me that many artists on our team are hoping that doing this show will result in finding love and/or getting laid. This has been so clarifying to me, about how to approach this final part of the project. Making a play that provides opportunities for love and sex feels so much more achievable than making a play that will help people get rich and famous. When I work without joy on this play it disappears and refuses my access to it. Of course, money is always around haunting me, like wishing I had more money, wishing I could pay people more money. But I hope the making of this play offends capitalism’s disenchantment of the world. I hope this play connects to the animism of all things in the brief time it and we are alive.
4. Lostness and the Unknown
My parents raised me and my siblings to navigate the woods since we were small, in a sport called orienteering. It’s something we still practice as a family, that my siblings now teach their children. One of the underlying actions of making this play is to map our position: to ourselves, each other, and the terrain around us. It is a practice that helps us stay present.
Having to figure out where I am actively appears a kind of now-ness that I like. These days we are used to always knowing where we are, and also, to paying very little attention to our surroundings. I think a rehearsal hall is one of the best places to work with the unknown. The room we’re in is also an important character. In rehearsal, the world feels like a very mysterious place. More sensual than regular life and therefore more accurate. I like paying attention to things with the closeness of rehearsal, that’s the same as when you are lost. Like, really listening. Really trying to see. During this process there were times I couldn’t see well and I kept becoming convinced that my eyes weren’t working. This made me curious about seeing in a different way. Less eyes.
5. The Body
I am thinking of the Anne Carson quote: “But awareness for Herakles is no mental event, it comes through the flesh.” The writing was done with my body. The walking, the lostness, the sickness, the lovemaking, the care work, the sleeping: all of it is writing. There is also way too much writing. I hope the rehearsal process is a way of turning the writing back into bodies.
This play has been a process of letting go of pretending really anything about bodies. It seems to me now that anything is ours very briefly. I’ve been wondering how this mortality and impermanence can be let in, maybe even be helpful. This play is very porous and very Piscean. It feels like the task is to be permeable. Though not so permeable that we dissolve. Some kind of permeability that helps us find coherence and power, that helps us appear.
We are working in an embodied practice led by Tedi Tafel as a way to access this play. Tedi and I have been collaborating for over a decade and it’s been thrilling to be inside this process with increasing curiosity and confidence, all of us together. There is a play, but also, the practice of listening and attending to energy and impulse is the play.
I feel really in love with this particular group of artists working on the play, who I have spent so much time with their bodies. There is a way to feel like you are less in one single body, and that is by associating yourself more closely with the bodies of others. This is why it will also be so fun to have an audience. How the audience is the one who ultimately assembles the play based on their own sensations and affinities and experiences. I feel protective of the audience’s space and autonomy to do their work. I can feel the play out there, wanting to come into existence. And I’ve been feeling the audience for some time, too. The audience being out there already was an important part of how this play came to exist.