 Hello. How's life? All right. I can't. All the days to forget it. Well, I said how's life. Oh, it's, um, Oh, could I forget the chocolates? I wonder she's upset. How's life? I said, can you hear me? Forget. Are you? It's a chocolate. Good morning. Should I come back later or? Not at all. I'll be a month. You remember, don't you? I mean, you're not the forgetful sort. I mean, I had you pegged as a berry sharp. Even kind of guy. We all have our off days. Another time. Not so important, but still. No, I'm all right. Let's good. Of course. Oh, it is. Wonderful. Wonderful. No problems at all then. No. Not at all. For everybody's got problems somewhere. Not me. Well, aren't you? Aren't we a mighty Ajax? Shield notwithstanding a thousand Trojan seers. Pardon me. A bit dramatic, wasn't it? No, not much. Well, then, are you here for the game? It'll start soon. Game one. But what about the transit of Mercury? To where? Where? To where else does Mercury transit? Any number of places. Strange. Lots of people here. Is there a game about to start? The number of places. Absurd. Absurd. Not really. We're talking about Mercury transiting. How's it doing that anyway? How's it doing that? Your questions keep getting more and more ridiculous. Damn, left my keys at the store. I have to go back. At least I get the chocolates there. In this hypothetical transit of Mercury. Well, are you having fun, Mr. Ajax? I beg your pardon? I said... What? What? How is it moving? I don't see how that's an illogical question. Is it... Perhaps it could be... Gonna be late, so I have my hide for sure. Off a bit of fun. Great way to meet. Floating under its own power. This is under gravity's power. Excuse me, sir. Do you have the time? My sister? She's a baker, you see. She's the most true. Certainly. It's absolutely true. What's this about, too? You know what? It's actually... What's all this, then? We're trying to have an intelligent discussion. Transit of Mercury, this one wants to talk about. To where and why? Oh, as the story goes, his wooden leg had a knot in it. Can't imagine how he tied it or why. Excuse me? Where and why and how and why first to know you as the world got mad? To where I get it now, but why the why? Well underway. So it seems. I imagine he's carrying a message. Oh, what's this? Good show. What's Jamie for you? A hound roll. I couldn't help but overhear. Fair point, but consider this. Perhaps some Mercury has transcended into the water. The message is bad. So what moves through pipes, then? What now? He had a good question after all. Of course it's all a matter of personal philosophy. We're discussing if nothing else. Nothing else. Nothing else what? Nice weather we've been having. Weather we've been having what? Well, not cloud in the sky. Nonsense. They say it's always cloudy in Seattle. Chocolate. Chocolate? Nothing else. And nothing else what? Cloudier in Buffalo is what I've been told. Chocolate? What's chocolate got to do with anything? Weather in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Whether Hershey, Pennsylvania or what? Oh, Mercury, the messenger of the gods. There must be cloudy somewhere. What's gods now? Awful day for messages. Cloudy days and no chocolates. What's the time? You talking to me? Where me? I think he's asking me. So me and them? Ajax went mad, you know. But he was great. That's awfully culturally insensitive of you, isn't it? Holy cow. That's timey or something. White roots went erupting. Me? Mercury's woman. Well, in Ajax, it's great. Why do we need culturally insensitive chocolates from Hershey, Pennsylvania? Cloudier in Seattle? Where's in Buffalo, I'm told. Holy cow. Me too. Not cloud in the sky today, though. It's 7-0-5. Why, thank you. Wonderful chocolate in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It's about the weather. Ooh, far too sunny for my taste. Ajax killed a herd of goats. Did he forget the chocolates, too? Are you mercury? I'm sure, I'm not toxic in the least. Yes, after all, humans are made of blood, flesh, and phlegm. Well, I do have to deliver these dogs. What a strange fellow. Very dramatic, too. Oh, strange. And he seemed a bit dramatic. What were we talking about? I don't recall. It was such a lovely conversation, too. Damn. Damn. I'm sorry. So sorry. I need to go. Hi, I'm Teddy Lytle. I'm Associate Artistic Director of Spectrum Theater Ensemble, and I directed a simulation of the mundane bedlam that is Sensory Overload by Charles L. Hughes. With us right now is Charles L. Hughes. Thank you so much for being with us today. Well, thanks for having me and for doing all of this. No, it was a real pleasure working on your play. And I really enjoyed it. And so I thought it'd be really exciting to try to get to know a little better. So your playwright, when did you discover theater? Oh, I was in high school. It was actually interesting because I was actually signed up for another class, but due to scheduling contacts, they just kind of threw me into a theater class. You know, without even, so I was like, oh, well, I guess I'll do this and see if I like it. And lo and behold, some years later. Yeah, what's happening in your life at this moment? Well, I'm going to Texas Tech and I'm in their MFA and Playwriting program, which is just awesome. Waiting for it to get started back up, of course, you know, with everything going on. But yeah, I'm just happy to be there and have a place to do that. That's awesome. So when were you diagnosed with autism? It was about eight or nine. So, oh man, I'm bad at math now. Everyone's going to know this. About 1918 years ago. And it was an interesting time. Yeah, it was Asperger specifically, which I'm not even sure where, how the classification system is working nowadays. But you blink and they change it. And it was an interesting time, but I'm just, you know, I'm all things considered. I caught it. They diagnosed me relatively early and I benefited a lot from that timeliness. Like what specifically kind of helped you grow in flower as much as you could. First and foremost, of course, my parents, they were just so insanely supportive. They got me helping, you know, growing up in a small town in West Texas. There was a lot of car mileage involved. Had to travel a lot. They took me 60 miles to Abilene to get to occupational therapy every week for years. Went to Fort Worth, went to support group meetings, just did all this that I'm just so insanely lucky to have gotten. And, you know, just raising me in very mind with my challenges and what I had to go through, but never, you know, keeping me away from learning, you know, even if the lessons could be a little tough. Absolutely. When they didn't need to be, you know, when they needed. So this play, I think the title in some ways says it all of what the topic is. Can you speak to why you wrote it or where it came from? It's interesting because I got the idea without realizing that I was getting the idea when I was younger and I was at some event, I believe it was an Autism Speaks kickoff luncheon or something like that. And they put the crowd through an exercise to sort of stimulate what it's like to go through sensory overload, what it's like to counter this on the spectrum where they would have a person sit down in a chair, they'd get another volunteer to come and pat them on, you know, the shoulder. Then they'd have another one circling around saying something and another one whispering right next to their ear. And thinking of that years later, I was getting my master's in English at the time and that just was like, wow, why don't I make that simulation experience, that experiment, that exercise into a simulation as a play. And I wrote it and worked on it and eventually stars just aligned for me. Absolutely. We have a couple of cast members here. Excellent. Hello, Adam. So I can't speak to what a sensory overload is. I can speak to what a panic attack is like. And this play certainly gave me a mild panic attack in reading it. Can Adam, can you speak to your experience the first time you read it and talk through it? Any thoughts that came to mind? Well, the first time I read it, I was dealing with, I was trying to read it off-hand while dealing with children and I could not follow it. I had to stop ten minutes in because I couldn't follow it. I had to go and read it on my own later on. So that was already a good sign. But yeah, like reading it through, it is such, it's that. That is a great way to show to someone who's more on the neurotypical side exactly what a sensory overload feels like. It's like the only one that I think even does even close to that is the opening shot of the made-for-TV Temple Grandin movie with Claire Danes where when she's coming off the plane and all you can hear is the rum-rum-rum of the engine. But people don't realize how much sensory is at the core of the autism spectrum in general. Like most of the symptoms and issues and challenges that come forth, like you can all, most of them, you can say just stem from just by the way our brains process sensory information and how the bombardment of that and trying to get around that may have hampered us learning other things at the correct times. Fallon, you know, any thoughts that you had when you first read it while we were rehearsing it? Well, I personally didn't really get necessarily sensory overloaded by this play because like my sensory overload is more rooted in anxiety. Like when I'm overwhelmed, like when I was in school, I would get overwhelmed with schoolwork, things like that. My main sensory per se issue is like more like to do with like food things, textures and things like that of food is my thing. So this particular play, like I just took it as it was kind of like a part, like a role, like something to do. I take art very seriously. So I always like put everything into it. And I don't, I kind of just push through it. And I don't really think too much about like what might be triggering that kind of thing. Absolutely. Did you feel like there was an intersection between the language that he used and what you feel or you identify with or was there a contrast and you could say that it's a very different, like a very, very different thing. Like depending on which sense you're talking about, it's like a very different thing. Really. I've only had an experience similar to what's in this play once. And it was actually started with a panic attack that I had received like what I thought was a bad grade when I was in high school. And as I was walking through the hall, but it wasn't real. Like I just had that in my mind. And it was like, I kind of felt like things are starting to spin out of control. Like, but that was the only time something like that happened to me. I do have to, I will say that I don't know if this is the case for Charles or for Adam. I'm not, but personally with me, I have been, I'm a lot more, I have other neuro atypical conditions and mental illness that I more often more affected by than I'm affected by ASD because I like Charles. I have Asperger's and I was actually very, it was actually usually very mild, but I have like a number of other things that have been like more prominently featured. And I was, I was, my diagnosis was Asperger's too back when that was a different thing. And I, I'm, I'm torn on the melding of it all under the ASD umbrella because on the one hand, it is all from the same place. So it should be considered that spectrum, that continuum. But a part of me does wonder if perhaps having the different names for the different levels might be a little bit more helpful for getting assistance and getting help because I mean it's not, it's not really right to say high functioning or low functioning anymore for good reason. So having something else to call the different degrees. So Charles, to speak to kind of what you were saying before, you got this idea from a simul, from an actual simulation because it does seem and has this layer of like non-sequitur that is to say randomness or things coming out of nowhere. But I feel like when you dig into it, there's something very specific going on in the trend of what people are saying and how they're saying it. I'm really glad you pointed that out because that's a, I'm not sure how conscious of it I was when I started this, but as I continued to revise it and was bringing more depth through because originally it was sort of just like, oh, the snowball effect when you have sensory overload you're hearing this, now you're hearing this and you, it's not so much that you have better hearing, it's that you're hearing everything and you're not really censoring it through sorting it out like you should be. But as I developed it, I thought of another way to sort of include that experience that I have. So if you notice each of the characters sort of has this one central thing they're sort of obsessed with that they're focusing on and that kind of came to the idea of a lot of people on the spectrum have these very specific interest areas. Personally, myself, you know, I was really in a great mythology when I was a kid. I was that kid who was always reading Edith Hamilton. So I had a character in there that, you know, they're the friendly mythographer. They're all about the chocolate yet or there was the, you know, and so they're all have these very specific focus. There's the, you know, the person they're talking about mercury, you know, because of course it can be, and that's again one of those easy things that are misunderstood because something I had trouble with, you know, younger on the spectrum is, wait, so this is, so mercury is the planet, but it's also this thing that's in a thermometer. So I wanted to include those sort of easy stumbling box for misunderstanding that sort of just can cascade when you're in this landscape of not navigating these sensory things. Having directed the play, I just got that the chemist was trying to talk about mercury in the thermometer and then, because I was like, they're talking about the planet. Okay. I got it. Two scientists. And then I'm like, like, now I'm like, right, mercury chemists deal with mercury. That actually makes me happy now. I also just realized that I didn't pick up on it. I think I'm also talking about the weather. Yeah. Whether it's this, whether it's that. Hershey versus W. Yeah. Pennsylvania Hershey chocolate. Well, no expert in this, but it seems like these are sort of things that would be easier to catch, you know, if we could have done this like in stage in person, you know, feeding off that sort of acting energy. What was the experience in doing this on zoom? Yeah, I just, I just really wanted to say, Charles, thank you for describing the hearing thing like that because that really describes to me like what my issue is. Like I used to say to people, I'm still saying to people, it's like the problem with me is, is that I can hear everything at once. So I effectively hear nothing because it's, it's not being able to filter. Correctly. Like if I can, if I can focus well enough, I can hear each individual thing, but trying to sift everything out. And sometimes if I'm focused here, I can, I know this sound is happening, but I don't know what it is. To answer the question at hand. To me, it was. Because I'm doing this off of my phone, because my laptop got stolen about two years ago, and I have not been able to afford a new computer of any kind. So I'm doing this all on my phone. So being able to like start and stop and, and any sort of reliable fashion was a big challenge to me. When I first like, um, did these zoom things? Like, I mean, I've been, I've been, I've become very familiar with zoom. I've been doing these meetings. It's, so it's been, I've gotten used to it, but I'd say acting on zoom is like a challenge because like in my, in rehearsal, like I really like the whole process of getting to see everyone. Because one of the things about STE for me is like, I finally met people who I can get along with because my whole life, I felt like the literal alien in every situation. It's like really refreshing. Like I finally have friends. So then the past five months or so of just being trapped with my parents. So sometimes even like zoom can still be isolating even if you're communicating. So that, so trying to overcome that isolation to actually put real feeling and thought into a character is a little more challenging than it would be in person when you're on a set. Yeah. No, for me, why I'm so committed to spectrum theater ensemble is that it is where you're allowed to come as you are. We're not expecting you to change. We're just expecting you to find some other people who are trying to exist as they are. And we speak openly about where we're out, whether you're neuro typical or neuro atypical. We, you know, we speak openly about where we are emotionally or sensitively or any of those capacities. And I think one of the most important things and ways that we can make it easier for the world to talk about that stuff is making art that expresses a point of view we might not understand. And to that end, I want to thank Charles L Hughes for writing such a wonderful look inside of what can sometimes feel like an unsafe place. It's challenging sometimes to show vulnerability and the play is certainly that and it's, it's really magical. And I think you did such an awesome job. Well, just again, I want to say thank you for not just your kind words, but just everything that everyone involved is done. I'm just, this is just a delight. And it feels like a dream to seeing this come forth just for something that I made. And what I like about playwriting is it lets me say things in ways that I still can't say any other way. And I think this play definitely reflects that. I think what really motivated this play was that some, you know, people do want to understand, but they don't have, you know, the context and I might not have the way, you know, it's like explaining driving on ice to someone who's never left South Texas. You got to find ways to do it. And I agree that's, I think what this art does, it helps people hopefully get this context, get this things that they get this understanding. They might not see if they don't come at it from any other angle. So for the record, how, how I would like to put it is we give people room to grow. Well, we don't force them to change. That's actually really, that's a really good quote. Oh, Jesus. Okay. Everything's fine. When you rewind, when you rewind that later, you're going to love what I said when you were gone. Great. That's fun. Oh dear. I'm nervous. Thank you guys for joining us. We'll see you soon. All right, take care. Nice to meet you, Charles. Nice to meet y'all. Stay safe, stay healthy and stay tuned.