Interview: Eric Coble of THE VELOCITY OF AUTUMN at The Abbey Theater Of Dublin

When he was writing THE VELOCITY OF AUTUMN in 2011, Cleveland playwright Eric Coble thought he had the makings for a dark comedy.

What Coble didn’t realize was he was writing a roadmap for himself.  The play will make its central Ohio debut Sept. 25-Oct. 4 at the Abbey Theater of Dublin (5600 Post Road in Dublin).

When he was writing the play about a woman dealing with old age, his mother Jan was in good health. However, as Coble began to gear up for its debut, his mother began to show signs of dementia and eventually had to be put into an assisted living facility.

“I thought what I was writing was fiction but some of the groundwork I laid out in the play actually came in helpful when it became time to actually deal with the real life situation,” he said. “It was like I was telling myself what I was going to need to know in the future.”

In VELOCITY, 80-year-old Alexandra (played by Josie Merkle) squares off against her family when they try to move her into a nursing home. When she threatens to blow the apartment up if they try to force her out, her estranged son Chris (Joe Bishara) becomes an unlikely go-between.

“We are excited to spark community conversation with ‘The Velocity of Autumn’,” said Bishara, the Abbey Theater of Dublin Supervisor. “This Central Ohio premiere highlights how our relationships with our parents evolve, challenge us, and require our care and attention.”

Coble’s mother never got to see the play, which eventually made it onto Broadway in 2014.

“She was still alive when it was first going  but she didn't get to New York. When it was done in Cleveland, her health wasn’t good in the month it ran here,” Coble said.

 “I don't know if she ever read it. We never discussed it. I can’t speak for her about what she would have thought of it, but I do have other relatives who saw it and thought it was fine.”

The idea for VELOCITY came to Coble during an afternoon walk around his neighborhood. An older neighbor was fighting with her children about moving into an assisted living facility.

“I thought, ‘She's in there right now. I wonder what's going through her mind right now? The idea of her holding herself hostage became sort of a weird dramatic idea.”

The play took its own “weird” journey to New York City. The playwright shopped it around and The Boise Contemporary Theater agreed to produce it. As the show was gearing up, a friend asked what Coble was working on.

“I said I got this show in Boise right now and he said, ‘Send me the script,’” he said. “A little while later, he said, ‘I want to move this to New York.’ Who was I to say no?

“After its run on Broadway, theatres around the country began asking for it. I’m happy to say it still has a life out there.”

Coble called the experience of landing on Broadway “a roller coaster ride, but a good roller coaster.” As a writer, he found it difficult not to get caught up in the gears of the Broadway machine.

“Making it onto Broadway was not the dream for that play,” he said. “I wanted to write something that would entertain me and explore issues I didn’t know the answer to.

“The thing I discovered about Broadway is you become a small part of a very large machine. You have five people devoted to creating an online presence, five people devoted to making videos and five people devoted to the print media. I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people working on this thing. I became a tiny, little cog in the machine. It’s exciting but it was a little overwhelming.”

Coble estimated he’s written close to 200 plays, ranging in size from 10-minute shows to full-length plays and screenplays.  He admits he set out to be an actor and not a playwright. His first role was playing a block of cheese in an elementary school play, although he didn't become serious about acting until high school.

Coble stumbled on playwriting when working on his Master of Fine Arts at Ohio University. While he was there, he wrote a play for a competition.

 “After it was done and people liked it, I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll write another one,’” he said. “All my training is as an actor. I have almost no training as a playwright, which, I’m sure some people would argue shows.”

Coble takes an old-school approach to his plays, writing every first draft in longhand. “If I ever get hit by a bus after I write the first draft on paper, that would be the end of that script,” he said, laughing. “No one would ever be able to read it or translate it into any usable form.”

Coble sees pros and cons to both fields. As a writer, there’s no call to the stage. He can rewrite a scene over and over until everything is “as sharp as I can make it.”

“The nice thing about being the actor is you get the applause right away when you do good work. Then you can lay the performance piece down and pick it up again for the next show.

“As a writer, I do all my work before (opening night) and then drop in and out of the process, knowing it’s in good hands. As an actor, you are those hands.”

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