Posted June 9, 2026

Behind the Scenes – PlayME

Chris and Laura, for readers who may not have discovered PlayME yet, can you give us an overview of what you do?

Chris: Oh, sure. We take some of the best plays from across the country, turn them into full-fledged audio dramas with sound effects and music, and recreate the rooms and environments the characters interact in. We try to create a fully immersive audio experience that’s almost like a movie without the visuals.

We want to bring theatre to anyone with an internet connection, a phone, or a computer. They can discover playwrights and plays, no matter where they live. And our hope is that it works like the music model, where you listen to music through Spotify or Apple Music, and it’s freely available. You then discover an artist, discover work, and get hooked on it. And then, when you discover a live performance is about to happen in your city, you go, “Ah, I want to be in that room! I want to buy a ticket, now.” So the goal is really to build future audiences for theatre.

How can people find PlayME programming?

Laura: We always say it’s really wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re on CBC, so people can visit their website at cbc.ca/playme. Or they can visit our website at www.playmepodcast.com. But we’re on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and wherever you can listen to a podcast.

I’ll just add something to what Chris said earlier: I think for us, as people who have created theatre, we know how frustrating it is for anyone who spends all that time creating a show…and then the time that it’s on stage is so fleeting. For us, giving plays a second life and building awareness of playwrights, especially among people outside the theatre, has been a real pleasure.

Can you tell us a bit about how you choose which plays you will feature?

Laura: Honestly, there’s no secret way that we do it. Basically, if a play is sent to us, or we see it, and it strikes a chord, we will pursue it. I mean, some plays translate better to audio than others, but most seem to do quite well.

I think we are also drawn to work that speaks to the zeitgeist of the moment. We did Hypothetical Baby by Rachel Cairns last year because there’s so much talk about what’s going on politically in the world regarding women’s rights. It seemed like an important show to highlight, where it’s discussing the right to have an abortion and the process, the hoops you have to go through. So anything that is “of the moment” is something that we will consider.

We try to do shows that represent different communities and places. It is a bit challenging because we are in Toronto and, unfortunately, don’t have a budget to bring people in. We did all our recordings online during the pandemic, and we still do that occasionally, although we really love being in the studio and recording in person. I think there’s a part of us that just wants to be off our computers and in a room with people. So the catalogue features more plays involving people who can get into the space with us, but we certainly hope to increase representation from across Canada.

Chris: In a way, it’s very similar to you and what you do with Scirocco Drama. Because what we create lacks the ephemeral element of theatre, they have greater longevity; these stories will last a long time. So we’re trying to think “What will be the Canadian story; what will be the Canadian identity that people will connect to in five years, ten years, twenty years’ time?”

PlayME allows listeners to access lots of plays for free, but fans can also get a membership that allows them access to more of the catalogue. How many plays have you recorded so far?

Chris: About a year and a half ago, I counted it up, and back then it was around sixty or seventy plays in total for PlayME. We’ve also produced audio dramas for the National Arts Centre, and for Tarragon Theatre when it was their 50th anniversary. We did seventeen plays for them, a retrospective of the most pivotal shows Tarragon produced over its fifty-year history.

For PlayME, a show is available for free on CBC for three years, then we relicense it and make it available to our PlayME+ members, whom we consider friends of PlayME. They also have access to other content: for example, we have a whole series of courses focused on different areas of professional development. You can get a little insight into subjects like how to transition from a playwright to a television writer, or how to write stand-up comedy or a novel. We have also held some one-off webinars and workshops with people like Jillian Keiley, who talked about pitching to theatre companies, and writers’ relationships with agents, etc.

The courses are offered to our membership first. We’re trying to create a community for theatre nerds who really love theatre and want a place to connect.

Laura: In terms of professional development, that element of our company is called PlayPEN. And we brought in people like Aurora Brown for sketch comedy, Erin Shields for playwriting, Sook-yin Lee for film, Ali Hassan for comedy, and Sandra Shamas for solo shows. We’ve done about twenty courses so far and look forward to offering more.

One of the reasons that we wanted to create PlayPEN is that Chris and I have theatre backgrounds. We met at York when we were in the directing program there, but since then, we’ve worked in theatre, multi-arts, film, television, radio, and podcasting. I feel like we’ve jumped around a lot. And every time we go from one area to another area, it’s like, “We don’t know anything about this. We don’t know how to get into this!” You can’t always find work in theatre, but the skills are transferable to other areas. And so we just try to create opportunities for people to connect with industry professionals and learn from people like Mark Crawford, Nicholas Billon, Michael Ross, and Michael Ross Albert.

We would have loved to just jump on our computers and meet with someone to learn about podcasting or film when we’ve made those leaps. So that’s the rationale behind it. It also helps build communities and lets people connect from across the country and beyond.

How did you two make the leap to PlayME?

Chris: As Laura mentioned, we are theatre creators first and foremost. We love theatre and its ephemeral element. It’s that magic of community being together, a communal experience in one room that happens and then it’s gone. And that’s a really beautiful thing about theatre.

But the problem is that it’s so limiting because you have to be in that city, which is quite often Toronto or a major city at that particular time, or else you don’t get that experience. And that was so frustrating for us. We also realized that theatre really needs to continue building audiences outside major city centres. A lot of people are doing a great job, but it is so difficult and so expensive.

And around the time we were thinking about this, we had an incredible experience: we did a radio drama with CBC, with the legendary Gregory J. Sinclair, who was the head of radio drama there. And he was so, so generous to us. He brought us in so we could experience the recording, and there was just an incredible sense of magic. This was for a show called Tunnel Runners, which actually has continued to live on. Laura wrote a seven-episode version released in 2024 on PlayME.

So this first experience in radio drama was right when podcasting was becoming a thing. So we thought, “Well, what if we take these three mediums and art forms; theatre, radio drama and podcasting, and kind of mash them together and see what we get?”

We weren’t 100% certain whether other playwrights would buy into it, because we were concerned that writers might think, “Well, this will dilute my ticket sales.” But very quickly, we had a few brave people buy in. Nicholas Billon was the first to say, “Okay, let’s try this out.” And then other playwrights joined in and soon discovered that they now had something available to artistic directors, publishers, and audiences all over the world. People could experience the kind of work happening on the West coast, the East coast, in Toronto, or in Winnipeg, etc., which isn’t necessarily available to everybody unless you spend your life on a plane.

So that’s how we fell into the whole podcasting realm. CBC brought us in under their wing soon after. This was in the early days of their podcasting department. They’ve been very good to us. That led us to being on CBC Radio One for, I think, three years.

Laura: Yes, we did about a hundred and fifty episodes for CBC Radio. That was an exciting opportunity because it felt like we were bringing the modern, contemporary element of theatre into the classic world of radio drama.

Thanks so much for this, Chris and Laura. I urge readers to check out your website and everything that’s on offer!

Many Scirocco Drama plays are available on PlayME for listening now, including Table for Two, In Seven Days, Serving Elizabeth, and Controlled Damage.