TEC – Development Workshop for New English Dramatic Text — “Holes”
— ABOUT THE PROJECT
My team and I are applying for a TEC grant to further develop my new play, titled “Holes”. Starting on January 27th of 2026, Christopher Morris (the director of the play), and I (the playwright), will work with an ensemble of five Montreal actors in a full-day workshop. With direction from Morris, our team will read the play, and work on our feet, working towards presenting the play as a staged reading. On the 8th of February, the play gets presented as a staged reading at the Centaur Theatre, as a part of 2026’s Winterworks festival (facilitated and programmed by NTS Alumni Rebecca Gibian) with the same team of actors. From there, the playwright will continue to develop the text, meeting with Morris, and the team (along with a lighting designer) to produce a workshop with a focus on tech in the National Theatre School’s Lab-LX studio on May 11th, 2026.
“Holes” was first developed during my second year at NTS as a part of the second year playwriting project, receiving dramaturgy from program director Andrea Romaldi. It received two table reads with student actors, and was first presented as a staged reading with professional actors at NTS in late March of 2025.
Here’s a brief synopsis of the play: ANDREW the amnesiac. is going to kill himself. The train’s right there. The tracks are right in front of him. He’s gonna jump… but he can’t. Not until he remembers why he wants to die so badly. But he can’t remember— he’s got holes in his brain. So does his girlfriend, PAT. She’s schizophrenic, but she could possibly hold the answer to his problem. A play about madness, love, and finding hope, Holes follows ANDREW, piecing together the moments before he’s arrived in front of the subway tracks, all while the lights from the metro car grow brighter and brighter.
I began writing this play because I find myself constantly in question of my own sanity. As a trans-woman, I’m often curious about the differences regarding my perceived reality, and the ‘common’ or ‘shared’ reality of those around me. With anti-trans rhetoric, claiming that trans people experience delusions, or are living in states of psychosis, hitting my ears, I began questioning my own experience, becoming curious about whether or not I am experiencing delusions of grandeur with regards to my gender. This, along with watching my own grandmother slip into psychosis towards the end of her battle with combination Alzheimer’s and dementia, I developed an incredible fear that I wasn’t actually trans, and instead, maybe experiencing the effects of a neurological disorder, schizophrenia, or other psychotic symptoms.
The play is a love letter to those who have been deemed ‘crazy’. For those who have been told that their experience is untrue or
misaligned from reality, and for those who have been made to feel unlovable for their own ‘realities’. Theatre is a place to lean into fear. It’s a space to imagine truth in all of its (sometimes) horrific forms. This play (for me, and at this time) is about asking how we can find ways to protect ourselves, and the ones we love, in a world that offers us no protection. Using memory, especially fraught memory, as a structure, I’m exploring how we can not only live in a world that deems our lives unliveable or ‘deluded’, but how we can prosper. How can we thrive in a world that seems hopeless.
This TEC grant will provide the funds for my team and I, as we continue in the next stages of this play’s development. By conducting workshops, and working with a group of actors alongside a director, and later a designer, it will allow me to work collaboratively as a playwright with artists in the community, so that we dive further into the heart of this story. This grant will also assist me in nurturing the relationship I have with Centaur, and share this work to the anglophone theatre community. This city is ready for risky, and exciting new English theatre, and I’m excited at the opportunity to work with this theatre community directly
— BIOGRAPHY
Jojo O’Neil (Playwriting, 2026) is a playwright, storyteller, and solo-performer from Markham, Ontario (home of the Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Anishinaabeg peoples), based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Quebec. She graduated with a BFA in Acting from Concordia University before studying Playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada.
Her stories navigate through the schisms of her characters’ inner and outer environments, often using expressionism to explore themes such as madness, intergenerationality, desire, home, and love. She writes impossible, desperate, and dangerous live transformations—necessary attempts to suture the many psychic wounds that plague the worlds of her plays. A provocateur, Jojo is interested in a theatre that can burn images into us, using it as a tool to explore the unanswerable and often horrific, in ways that make us feel not so alone.
Her plays include: The Harpy (solo-play, development funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, staged reading at The Pipeline Reading series, directed by Barry Bilinsky 2024) which won Infinithéâtre’s ‘Write-On-Q’ playwriting competition, Holes (staged reading at the National Theatre School of Canada 2025, dramaturgy by Andrea Romaldi) which will have a reading at Centaur Theatre’s 2026 Winterworks Festival directed by Christopher Morris, AHOY !! (TYA, staged reading with Geordie Theatre 2026, direction and dramaturgy by Dean Patrick Fleming), When The Sun Consumes Us (dramaturgy by Ann-Marie MacDonald), and DREAMHOUSE (solo-play, Concordia University, directed by Laura Quigley 2020). Her play No Jumping is set to premiere at the NTS New Words Festival in April 2026, with dramaturgy by Sky Gilbert.
In 2022, she became a co-founder of performance group Cardinal Collective, producing variety shows, cabarets, and theatre performances in Toronto. Jojo has shared her works in writing and performance across Canada, and internationally in the United States, and in Greece as a Mudhouse Residency alumna in 2024 & 2025.
