DIGGING FOR THE ROOT, FROM THE DESK OF Eric Coble

I’m a playwright. 
Unless I’m only writing one-man shows about my life to be performed by me, I have to get into the brains and feelings of people who are not me.  It’s in the job description. 
With practice and listening and watching and experience, that process gets easer. But sometimes the challenges are greater than others. 
When I wrote “The Velocity Of Autumn”, the lead character was an 80-year-old woman.  Which I decidedly was not. 
But by focussing on what she WANTED and what she was willing to do to get it, I could get her pulse, and from there the details of her background and aging body bubbled to the surface, wedding fact and fiction from dozens of older women I knew.
In writing “The First Snow Of Summer”, I faced a different challenge.  It’s a play about a large family of brothers and sisters who share a lifetime of stories, animosity, misunderstandings, and love. 
And I’m an only child.
What do I know about having a sibling who has been through everything you’ve been through almost your entire life?  The struggles for parental attention, self-definition, to remain true to so many members of your family AND true to yourself?
Again, all I could do was think, “What kind of people would be most interesting to get in a room (or in this case on a deck) together - what kind of ambitions, dreams, and resentments will give us the most fireworks?  Then it became a question of WHY these particular people were the way they were - focussing on how they had shaped each other over a lifetime.  And then how would they behave in what might be the last moments they have together?  What do they need to say?  What can they never say?  How do they pull free from the injuries of the past to build a future?
And I had created a family. 
A squirmy, aching, loving, splintered family whose deepest dream is to REMAIN a family.  But the ways they envision that happening are incompatible. 
And there’s the play.
BUT.
One of those characters is also on the autism spectrum.
I am not on the autism spectrum.
In an early reading an audience member with direct experience of the spectrum very politely yet very clearly told me what I was getting right and the many, many things I was getting wrong.
Which I would have been a fool not to listen to.
That set me on another round of research, meetings, observations, pondering, and rewrites. 
With each rewrite the character got more specific.  Less some kind of metaphor (although she and all the other characters are, of course, still metaphors) and more a full human being with odd quirks and her own mysteries that she may or may not share.
And the play suddenly became more multi-faceted. 
And my understanding of the world got bigger.
Which, I suspect, is why I got into this art form.
All art is created by the artist sending themselves into an altered state, seeing and feeling things that don’t exist in our reality, and then bringing those visions and feelings back to share with the rest of us.
Some plays require going further into one’s personal unknown than others.
But when we get back, THIS world is a bit richer and more wondrous.
May the audience feel the same way.