Cool Cleveland People

Playwright Eric Coble

Cool Cleveland: Tell us about Ten Minutes to Cleveland. The show sounds just so "Cool Cleveland."
Eric Coble: Maybe I should have called it Ten Cool Minutes to Cleveland. It’s my celebration of all things Cleveland. I thought it would be interesting to make a specific play about Cleveland, and a coherent theme – seeing how the locations impacted the people in it. I tried to write ten short plays that were very distinctly location-based – where, say, the scene that takes place in Tremont couldn’t take place in Legacy Village, or the one on the RTA couldn’t take place in the Flats. It seemed especially suitable because it’s taking place as the last show in Dobama’s Coventry space. '''

How did you come up with the locations?
I asked myself, “What are the archetypal locations in any city?” There’s always a bar, a sports place, neighborhoods – and I came up with 20 archetypal locations, then whittled them down to the final ten. It takes place on a single day – staring on the Detroit Superior bridge at 6AM, then the West Side Market, an RTA train, Legacy Village, and the Cleveland Clinic. Then after lunch (intermission), it goes on to Tremont, Jacobs Field, The Rock Hall, Lakeview Cemetery, and ends up at 2AM in The Flats, directly under the bridge where it started.

When you picked the locations, did you have an underlying theme in mind?
We’ve always been a divided city, from the East Side/West Side thing and on. What began to emerge was – what locations in Cleveland bring us together, and what pushes us apart? Like Jacobs Field – everybody’s there to cheer for the Indians, but people cheer different ways, and the fault lines start to emerge.

I wrote it for an ensemble of 6 actors – 3 men, 3 women – racially and age-diverse, as much like Cleveland as I could make it with 6 people playing all the parts. They play something like 50 characters who don’t overlap, though some do know each other. We have a great cast – Nick Koesters, Kimberly Brown, who was in For Colored Girls..., Jimmie Woody who was just in The Exonerated, Marc Moritz, who’s now back in Cleveland, Sadie Grossman, and Nan Wray.

You’re known for your satiric comedy – is a lot of it coming from a satiric place?
I’m never sure what the difference is between satire, farce, and comedy. Some pieces in it are more serious – like the one in Lakeview Cemetery. But I’d say this piece gently pokes fun at the locations and the people.

How did this show come about? Did you write it on spec, or pitch it first?
I pitched the idea to Joyce [Casey – Dobama’s Artistic Director]. But I’ve had a long history at Dobama, they’ve done three other premieres of my shows –Sound Biting in '96, then Virtual Devotion, then TRUTH: The testimonial of Sojourner Truth. But it had been a few years since I had a show there. Joyce needed a light comedy to balance the season, especially after The Exonerated. I pitched the idea, showed her some of my ten-minute plays, and she bravely said yes.

You’re still doing a lot of children’s plays, and they seem to be getting done all over.
Yeah, they’re getting picked up around the world. I just heard of two that are happening in New South Wales (Australia) and Belgium.

One of the things I’ve admired about your kids’ plays is how sophisticated and funny there are. Like your Bill Gates figure building a robot boy in "Pinocchio 3.5", or your "E" Channel fairytale.
Cinderella Confidential.

I think of it as your "Simpsons sensibility" – you don’t write with a different voice for children than you do for adults.
Well, I have two styles – there are the straight biographical things, like the Edgar Allan Poe piece, Sojourner Truth, Sacagawea. But it’s true -- I always write to entertain myself, my friends, my kids. A look at pop culture and modern tempo intrigues me and works its way into all my stuff. That’s the nice thing about writing for theater, you can write about what’s going on around you right now, you don’t have to wait years for your project to get green lighted.

I think back to the first play of yours I ever read, Isolated Incidents, back in ’94. It seems to have the seeds of so many of your obsessions –
Pop culture, the media, celebrity obsession, speed, lack of connection.

I love so many of the scenes of that play – like the welfare mom doing her phone sex job while she’s vacuuming.
I turned it into a screenplay – it’s been floating around Hollywood for a few years. And it’s weird, because the things I was writing about, they don’t seem very futuristic right now. Terrorism, diseases, everybody wearing headsets – I remember writing in the stage directions "headsets like Madonna wears" – now I guess they’d have to have implants to make it feel like the future.

Kind of hard being that prescient, isn’t it?
I call it "short shelf life theater". Most of my plays are photos of a moment of American culture. The jokes I made in Sound Biting – everyone assumed I was talking about Monica Lewinsky, but it was written before any of that happened. I guess there’s some little ego gratification, being able to see where things are headed. But it doesn’t bode well for the society, or the play – before you know it, it’s old news. The minute some parent snaps and kills another pre-school parent, Bright Ideas will cease to be funny. Let’s hope that never happens.

And you’ve got another dark comedy in the wings – your reality-TV send-up.
The Dead Guy – at the Play House Next Stage Festival, it was called One Week to Live, but that sounded too much like a soap opera. It’s getting produced this fall in Denver at Curious Theater – it’s a smart, young theater; they did Bright Ideas, too. It also is getting a production at Highland Rep in Asheville, North Carolina. It’s opening the Denver season, and I’ll go there to work on it. There are a couple of theaters here that have expressed interest, so I’m crossing my fingers.

So are you enjoying your "overnight success"? After, how long, ten years of working the trenches?
Next year it’ll be 15 years since I wrote my first play. I feel lucky to have so much work.

How did you get to Cleveland?
I grew up on the Navaho and Ute reservations in New Mexico – my mom moved to New Mexico to teach and we ended up living on the reservations. I loved it, growing up on dirt roads. It was really, really poor and more violent than most places – but also a wonderful, close-knit community, a good group of kids to grow up with. I went to Fort Lewis College, a small liberal arts program. I had to major in English, because they didn’t offer a BFA. Which was good, I had to take history, math, English.

Then I started looking for graduate schools in acting. I didn’t plan to be a writer. I was accepted to Ohio University in their MFA acting program. While I was at OU, I wrote my first one-act, in '92. It was produced when I was there, and it was well-received. Through OU, I had a 2 year internship at the Cleveland Play House as an Acting intern, when Josie Abady was in charge. Then my fianceé, Carol Laursen, got a lab tech job at University Hospitals – we had to stay an extra year. So I agreed to become an actor/teacher at Great Lakes Theater Festival. We stayed on some more – and by then we felt at home.

I can’t think of any other city I’d rather live and work in. Cleveland has been very good to me. And the Playwrights’ Unit at the Play House is invaluable – you know how important that is, hearing other people’s work, learning what makes a play. It’s been an incredible opportunity.

What else is coming up for you?
I just had a commission at Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, helping create something for their apprentice company. After the show at Dobama, I have a short piece in the "Seven Ages" touring show by Great Lakes Theater Festival, that opens on April 24. In Cleveland, a couple of potential things – we’ll have to see. Out of town, I’m working on an adaptation of Lois Lowry’s The Giver for Oregon Children’s Theater. It’s a book that everyone reads in middle school – about a community that values safety above all else. I’ve got three screenplay "interests" right now – things moving along in the movie world, though nothing’s been made yet. They’re just one more piece of the income stream.

That’s one question everyone seems to wants to know the answer to – how do you put together an income as a writer?
We cobble together the Coble income. There’s no one job that says, "Hey, I’m set for 5 months". It’s more like a couple hundred here and there. But that’s one great thing about living in Cleveland, we can live cheaply here. We have lousy health insurance -- anything short of losing a limb or decapitation, we’ll be paying for it. My wife Carol teaches a class at John Carroll. I’ve written continuity for benefits, radio shows, car commercials, comic books...

I always think of you as the "Yes" guy -- the guy who never says no to a job.
Well, I do say no, now and then -- but if somebody offers something new, that’s usually something I want to try.

What I mean is, more than anyone I know, you seem to approach writing as a job.
I approach it as a craft. That I owe to a writing professor. He always said, "A plumber can’t wait for the muse to strike." You have to work. I do try to write something, even when it’s not good.

The jobs I’ve taken – before I say yes, I have to figure out there’s something that interests me about the project – somebody I want to work with, or a theme. I’m fortunate to like the people I work with here. I do value my time. I’m keenly aware of having limited time here. If I would conk off tomorrow, I want to have been working on a project I believed in and feel proud of, and also have a body of work.

I work out of the house, write up in the attic, write long-hand on the couch. I’m a happy Cleveland Heights permanent resident who will do this as long as I can do it. So long as I can support myself and my family as a writer.

You seem very hooked into the community. I remember seeing rows and rows of your Cleveland Heights neighbors at your last Play House reading.
I feel very well-taken care of by Cleveland. That’s one reason I wanted to do the Dobama play. After Bright Ideas started getting done, things were starting to move for me in other places, but I hadn’t had a play here in several years. That’s one of the joys of getting to work at the Play House, Dobama, Ensemble, CPT – getting to share work with my neighbors.

Tell us about having Bright Ideas done in New York –- how did that change things for you? I mean, a commercial production, the director from Urinetown – that was a career breakthrough.
In a lot of ways, having an off-Broadway production was...just another production. What was so different about it was I was there for the whole rehearsal process. It meant being on the ground, working on the play, but away from my environment – I didn’t do laundry, take kids to school. I’d be at rehearsal all day, then leave rehearsal at 5-6 at night, do rewrites 'till I fell asleep, type it up, and bring them in. It was a good experience in that I learned I could do it – there was an energy to it, electricity to keep working that way. But it was also unreal, nothing to ground you. I missed the fall, leaves changing, the kids. It didn’t make me want to live there, it still made me feel like a tourist.

We had this odd luxury of 3 weeks of previews, 20 in total. I went into it having seen 3 other productions of the play, feeling pretty good about it. Then it got to NY, and had its first preview – it just laid there like a dead fish. Oh, the terror. "Uh-oh, you think, maybe they’re right, maybe New York IS really different." I had this really vivid nightmare after that deadly preview – that an actor was in this huge suit of armor, falling off the stage, and I kept thinking that I need to jump up there and help him. And folks from the Playwrights Unit were in the dream -- you were there, Faye was there, Eric Schmiedl – and you guys told me to back off, that it would take care of itself, and right itself. I woke up feeling, "yeah, it’s going to be all right." And it did start to work, after that.

Then suddenly all the critics were there, The Times, Variety – that’s when it hit, that it was a big deal. We had mixed to good reviews – and good word of mouth. Now the play has done that strange thing that I despise: it had to go through the tiny eye of going through New York to get done anywhere else, and now it’s getting more productions. By the end of the whole experience, a) I’d had a good time, b) I was glad to have done it. I wasn’t the belle of the ball, but I hadn’t set anyone’s hair on fire. And I made some friends that I’m still in touch with.

What’s different about doing theater here in Cleveland?
There is a theater culture here – a slightly more relaxed and joyous element to a lot of theater here. No critic is going to shut down your career here.

Are there any trends you’ve seen in New York theater that may or may not come here?
In New York there seems to be a shortening of plays lately. First they went down to 90 minutes, now it’s not uncommon to have a "full-length" play that’s an hour long. There’s a sense that paying $60 to $80 bucks for a 60 minute play is okay. Critics seem to like them, and even some audiences -- people can go to a show and still eat dinner and be home early. But I don’t think Midwesterners are gonna go for that. That’s a lot of money for that little squiggly piece of squid. When I pay those prices, I’d like it to be "Angels in America", thank you.

What do you think the Cleveland scene has, and what does it need?
I agree with a lot of what you wrote about in angle, about a healthy ecosystem – you have a need for the small and midlevel theaters. What’s great here is the number of theaters -- more than in Houston. I get to see more shows, write more shows, be in more shows. I wish there were more venues for playwrights, but it’s not bad. The sheer amount, the variety – and I like the people, that people seem to enjoy doing it, doing it for the love of it.

We need more chances for little places to keep bubbling – and I’d like to see more people stay in town. I’m always grateful for the ones who manage to stay here and keep working. There’s more support than there was 10 years ago. It seems like there’s more of a shift, more breaking down the walls to let artists work in different places, moving between mid-sized theaters. People are crossing the river, God bless them.

Ten Minutes to Cleveland runs now thru 5/8 at Dobama Theatre. http://www.Dobama.org.

Interview by Cool Cleveland theater correspondent Linda Eisenstein Linda@coolcleveland.com

Photo by Linda Eisenstein

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