Four actors are working their way through a tense scene in rehearsals for the play “Falling” when an unscripted visitor comes loping through the action.
It’s a small dog named Ireland, whose apparent attempt at a walk-on part barely fazes the admirably focused cast of the InnerMission Productions show.
Making do with the unexpected and the improvised can be a way of life for a small theater troupe like InnerMission: “Falling” was being rehearsed in the living room of an arts patron (and Ireland’s owner) in Mission Hills.
Unpredictable events also have a way of crashing through the lives of the people depicted in “Falling,” the Deanna Jent drama that opens at the Diversionary Black Box space in University Heights this week.
The play documents the struggles and humble victories of a family with a teen-age son named Josh, who is profoundly autistic.
Jent was inspired to write the piece in part because of her own family’s real-life experiences in raising son Andy, who likewise has autism.
But while “Falling” depicts the challenges the family encounters with Josh — his rigid adherence to schedules and rituals, his outbursts of aggression — Jent emphasizes in a script note that the play is less about his condition than about an aspect of the human condition.
As director Samantha Ginn observes the rehearsal and works with the actors, she drops in terms such as “regulate” — used to describe how those on the autism spectrum seek what can be an elusive sensory and emotional equilibrium.
Ginn knows this territory: She’s a former special-needs preschool teacher whose current projects include an improv program called “Monday Night Live!,” geared to young people with disabilities.
Part of her rehearsal technique is to have the actors run once through just the physical aspects of a scene, without speaking the lines. The idea is to get the characters’ motions in their bones.
Watching it is like witnessing an elaborate and entertaining but at times puzzling pantomime.
The idea seems especially fitting for “Falling,” because nonverbal communication can be a critically important tool for those on the autism spectrum.
In my own family home, we use extensive visual supports — including whiteboards, an iPad and picture-enhanced “social stories” — to help interact with our autistic teen-age son, who is partially verbal but has difficulty with complex sentences and conversations.
Frustrations nevertheless can mount when he can’t articulate his needs in a way we can understand.
As with other challenging disorders and conditions, there can be a tendency in pop culture to spotlight “miracles” or special gifts among the affected.
Jent felt that “not all of the stories were being represented,” she says in a phone interview from St. Louis, where she is head of the theater department at Fontbonne University.
Specifically, “this story wasn’t out there” — meaning that of Josh, which draws on her family’s experiences with son Andy.
As “Falling” has been staged around the country and world since its 2011 premiere, Jent has found that not only people with autism in their own families, but those who have confronted a range of other issues, have recognized themselves in it.
Jent remembers one pair of sisters in particular whom she spoke with after a post-show talkback (a practice InnerMission also plans to implement).
“One of them said, ‘We just want to know, how did you know that’s how we were feeling?,’” she recalls.
Jent recalls that while she was writing “Falling,” she also was directing a production of the play “My Name is Asher Lev,” based on the Chaim Potok novel.
Since Josh’s story first hit the stage six years ago, there have been some dramatic changes in Jent’s family.
Last February, her husband Stephen — a teacher and the inspiration for the character of the devoted dad Bill in the play — died of a heart attack at 57.
Besides grappling with her own grief, Jent had to figure out how to impart the news to Andy. A big part of that was explaining that his father would no longer be the one taking him for a burger or a trip to the store on the weekend.
The title of “Falling,” it’s important to note, has meaning beyond a sense of struggle or distress; it also refers to the delicate feathers that give Josh pure, endless delight as he spills them from a box and watches them waft toward the floor.
His family shares in that joy. And it’s a reminder that sometimes the most unlikely gifts can also be the most profound.
This is the latest in an occasional series on how theater is exploring autism and connecting with people on the spectrum. The series has offered a behind-the-scenes view of InnerMission Productions’ “Falling” — a play with a young autistic man at its center — as it progressed from first auditions to the show’s opening this month. U-T theater critic James Hebert, who has a child with autism, also has been taking a broader look at other theater programs and resources for those with special needs and their families.
When: Previews begin Friday. Opens Saturday. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays (no performance Nov. 23); plus 4 p.m. Nov. 13 (industry night). Through Nov. 25.
Where: Diversionary Theatre’s Black Box, 4545 Park Blvd., University Heights.
A recent joint production of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” in Indiana and Syracuse, N.Y., was the first staging of the play to star an actor on the autism spectrum.