I came to know Eric through his wife, the actress Ellen McElduff, who was in a play of mine at the Mark Taper Forum. Everyone was double-cast, and one of the actors balked at playing a rude young boy who spits on a baby. Ellen, nothing if not game, stepped into the role, spat with glee, and was wonderful in what turned out to be even better as a pants role.

This led to Ellen inviting me and my partner, Kathleen Dimmick, the dramaturg at the Taper at the time, to a gumbo party she and Eric were hosting at their home in one of L.A.’s canyons. It was the early 1990s, during Eric’s transition to writing for television. Over time, dinners with Eric and Ellen became a regular thing, sometimes organized around Super Bowls. Eric was a sports fan, not without irony, to be sure, but a fan nonetheless. He wrote a brilliant metaphysical baseball play, The Dalai Llama Goes Three for Four, that appeared, along with one of mine, in a bill of one-acts about baseball at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. I never talked with Eric about his Buddhist beliefs, but they were all over that play: batter and pitcher locked in the pure present, in a deadly serious yet utterly absurd contest obsessed with stats, as if numbers could pin down something that exists only in the moment.

The last time I saw Eric was at a get-together for Super Bowl 2025. At this point in his life he was away in L.A. for months at a time, steeped in stories of crime, murder, and mayhem while suffering the debilitating effects of a progressive illness. Time spent at home with family, friends, and football must have been a welcome distraction. This particular Super Bowl was held in New Orleans, a city that was important to Eric and Ellen. They had a house there and would go down for Mardi Gras, or Eric would go between jobs to write and get recentered. He was extremely fond of the place—the music especially—and a lot of that music, and many of the musicians, found their way into Treme, Eric’s love letter to New Orleans.

The outlandish halftime extravaganza at that game featured Samuel L. Jackson as Uncle Sam, introducing the headliner, Kendrick Lamar. Jackson had been in the 1983 premiere of Eric’s Native Speech at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. That dark, jazzy riff on urban decay and the power of the broadcast voice landed at Soho Rep in New York in 1991, just ahead of a play of mine. The inventiveness and sheer athleticism of the language was a hard act to follow. From that play, here’s Hungry Mother, Eric’s fever-dreaming late-night radio DJ, with “a weak signal but a strong message…Stay with me now. All you night people, all you no-sleepers…Don’t touch that dial. Because whatever it is—it’s got your number now, and it’s dialing back.”

In a very different register, a few lines from Eric’s breakout hit, On the Verge, which premiered in 1985 at Baltimore Center Stage: “I have seen the future. And it is slang.” Or, “I don’t know about all of you, but I do have a sudden craving. A burning desire. Intense, painful longing. (Beat). For Cool Whip.”

Eric’s plays were about language, among other things: progress, civilization, culture, theatre itself. His characters often use highly specific words (quotidian, sojourner, somnambulist, tonsorial). Eric cared deeply about how this language was handled by actors. He begs in one of his production notes for On the Verge: “Simple, plain, unaffected American speech, please. If the words are decorated, oversung, or have English lacquered over them, they become arch, unbearable, precious.”

It’s ironic, all this language pouring forth from one so—taciturn may be too strong a word, then again, maybe not; let’s say reticent. I remember saying to Ellen that I didn’t talk much. She responded in her Southern way, “Oh, honey.” As in: You have no idea. That said, Eric would occasionally hold forth about politics, or an obscure topic that caught his interest, or about the quirks, personalities, difficulties, and absurdities he encountered as a Hollywood showrunner. He knew a lot about a lot, given his access to high-level contacts, and was, unsurprisingly, a huge reader. How he managed to read and write all that he did while supervising and rewriting other writers in writers’ rooms all over hell, I’ll never understand.

Eric had a big career, and aside from the mark he made in television, he leaves behind an important theatrical legacy. Along with other experimental writers of his era—Mac Wellman, Jeffrey Jones, María Irene Fornés, Len Jenkin, Harry Kondoleon—Eric made language sit up and bark, creating highly musical, rhythmic, invisible worlds.

So there’s the body of work—substantial, enduring—and then there’s the rest of it: at home, watching the game, drifting through talk about this and that, caring, not caring, then suddenly caring again about the score…and that’s the ballgame.

Quincy Long is a New York-based playwright. His recent play, Midwest Porn, was produced by the Tent Theater in 2026 in New York.