Emmett Doyle and Michael Wesely are students—a senior and a junior, respectively— at Apollo High School in Minnesota and are both acting in a school production of A Christmas Carol. Doyle is playing Scrooge and Wesely is playing Marley, who visit Scrooge in ghostly form. As noted in the December 6th St. Cloud Times, both have Asperger’s Syndrome and have found acting a way to work on their social and communication skills.

Elements of theater such as following a script (which enforces turn-taking in conversation), interpreting body language, developing empathy for their characters and working as a team all help with their everyday lives.

Through acting, they are memorizing social cues, which can in turn become more instinctive to them offstage.

“One of the cool things about theater is it’s easier to talk to people. You don’t feel so isolated,” said Wesely, a freshman. “When you get up on stage, you’re not you. Even though you’re not you, you can express yourself as that character.”

“It’s a lot easier to read these lines and think about what you’re doing.”

Theater, the St. Cloud Times notes, is potentially a “legitimate form of autism therapy.” As the article also notes:

Acting is something [Doyle and Wesely] do almost every day.

“We basically spend our entire time acting like we’re not autistic,” said Doyle.

Acting can be seen as sustained role playing, perhaps……….

I really think of this piece as a love story between a husband and wife, between a mother and a son and between a father and a son.”

Says playwright Stacey Dinner-Levin of her play, Autistic License, which will be performed April 25 and 26 at the Illusion Theater in Minneapolis. More from Dinner-Levin (who has an autistic child) about her inspiration for writing Autistic License:

“This play is based upon our experience of raising a child with autism - the things that happened in our family that were tragic, surreal and funny. This is the kind of stuff you can’t make up! Nobody sees what goes on in families with a child living with a disability. To me theater was the perfect vehicle to tell this story and to give voice to all families living with disability. I really wanted to open the doors, take down the walls of our house and say, ‘Come in, take a good look, and see this for what it is: the struggle of my life, along with the beauty and the joy.’”

The play offers a glimpse of what it is like to raise a child “in a world that has far too many opinions on what is ‘normal.’” Michael Paul Levin, the playwright’s husband, plays the role of the autistic son.

Dinner-Levin’s comment about the play as about a couple of “love stories”—between father and son, mother and son, and between husband and wife: This rings home most of all with me. Even on the toughest, darkest gray days it’s love and sticking together that sustain.