On Sunday, October 14, Purnell theater students attended a workshop conducted by theatre professional, Andy Paris, a founding member of the Tectonic Theatre Project, an innovative theatre company based out of New York City renowned for writing and performing the acclaimed play and HBO special The Laramie Project. Using research, interviews, and original text gathered and written by students in performing arts faculty Leslie Patient's Creating Theatre class, participants explored "Moment Work", a methodology of creating and analyzing theatrical pieces that was first developed by Moisés Kaufman, founder and artistic director of the Tectonic Theatre Project. Students interested in acting, technical theatre and the creative process in general were invited to attend the three-hour workshop along with students in the Creating Theatre class.

Dramatic topics being explored included the themes of "adoption" as developed by students Poppy Briggs and Christina DeGiovanni, as well as "teens dealing with chronic health issues" as developed by Alyssa Trim, Jasmin Williams and Alexandra Martini. Students in the Creating Theatre class will write one-act plays based on the work developed in the workshop which will then be performed at the end of fall term. The Creating Theatre project was first designed in June 2007 by Leslie Patient during Project Based Learning workshops at the McCord Symposium for Distinguished Teachers. "The Tectonic Theatre Project creates exactly the kind of intelligent and thought-provoking theatre I wanted my students to explore," said Patient. "I wrote them down in the summer as hypothetical Subject Matter Experts for the project, and am so excited for our students that in the end the imagined has become a reality."