The project is also intended to provide at least a bit of employment for artists at a time when stage work has evaporated. Performed by a cast of nine local actors who, like the series’s design team, lost jobs when Round House’s season screeched to a socially distanced halt last month, “Homebound” will be written by a different Washington-area playwright each week and shot by the actors in their homes on their phones and tablets.

There is no showrunner and no preordained arc to the 10-episode series, which will develop, relay style, over the course of the spring, with each writer handing off to the next. Assigned two actors, the writers are free to use their own voices and lead the story where they will, keeping an eye on continuity and character development. The progress of the pandemic will surely influence the show’s shape, while its tone may be as variable as the emotional tenor of these lockdown days.

Is it theater, though? As companies with darkened stages put productions online, questions of form and medium have become surprisingly contentious.

Petri, for one, thinks of her episode — a comedy about the disembodied weirdness of Zoom life and the solace of human connection — “as fundamentally a 10-minute play, but it happens to be set inside your computer.” Round House’s artistic director, Ryan Rilette, is adamant, though, that the pieces that will make up “Homebound” are not plays, and the series is not theater.