ABout the author
Quiara Alegría Hudes was born in 1978 as one of five children and raised in West Philadelphia by a Puerto Rican mother and a Jewish father. She describes her childhood neighborhood as primarily filled with immigrant and African-American families, with her mother as the only technically "Latina" woman in the area. Her musical influence came at a very early age through her Jewish aunt, a composer in New York who would give her "improvisation lessons" by putting on a scratchy blues record, and telling her to play along with it alone in the piano room of their house for an hour or so. Her aunt was also a large multicultural and artistic influence for Hudes, taking her to late night Etta James concerts in bars when she was nine years old, and to see Mikhail Baryshnikov and members of the Alvin Ailey Company dance solo when she was in her pre-teen years. She went to public high school in Philadelphia and also took music lessons at Settlement Music School in classical piano, composition, and Afro-Cuban piano (Hamilton). As a child her family spent summer vacations in Puerto-Rico, which kept the landscape of the island "in her heart for sure" (Johnson). Growing up in a bi-lingual household made Hudes feel like her life was constantly in translation, which became a common theme in her playwriting.
Mrs. Hudes graduated cum laude from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in Music Composition and decided to pursue a professional career in music thereafter (Quiara.com). She recalls having some success at her musical career in New York, but always feeling like there was something missing. One day a producer friend of hers made a blunt criticism of her music saying "You know, you're music is good, but I'm not sure its great." Immediately Mrs. Hudes attributed the problem to the fact that she had never been able to find an individual voice in her music. "The question with music was, 'do I have something different to say?' because I was so fascinated and immersed in what other people had to say musically, whether it was Bach, whether it was Stevie Wonder, whether it was Etta James, I loved music and I loved what people had to say through it" (Hamilton). Quiara Hudes had been writing her entire life, she just never thought that it was something one could do as a career, until she actually tried it, and found that she never had the question of finding her own personal voice in her writing. She went on to study playwriting at Brown University under Paula Vogel, who became a major influence and mentor for Mrs. Hudes. Other influences include Tony Kushner, Sarah Ruhl, Annie Baker, and August Wilson (Sullivan). She currently lives with her husband Ray Beauchamp and two children in New York City and teaches playwriting at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT (Quiara.com).
In speaking about her synthesis between music and playwriting, Hudes talks about her process in writing her one-act play, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue, which became the first installment of her Elliot Trilogy, back in 2005: "I found a way to actually more literally include my musical interest, which is kind of exploring the musical structure of fugues, and applying that to an American story, and in this case the American story was about four Puerto Rican family members who had all served in the United States Marines (Hamilton)." She identifies the primary difference between writing music and writing plays in the fact that music transcends meaning and words convey meaning, but that her process is similar in working between the two mediums. When Mrs. Hudes first started composing music, she drew inspiration for her compositions from mistakes she made while practicing classical piano pieces such as Bach or Chopin. Hudes was fascinated by dissonance and said she "loved the way the wrong note sounded, and that is very similar with writing to me. I can plan out things to a T, I can really have a preconceived notion of where things are going, but its what surprises me when I'm actually writing, what comes out the wrong way or differently than I had expected that is really the direction I should be going in" (Hamilton).
The major themes of Hudes' work include family and community, roots and heritage, the pursuit and failure of the American dream, redemption and recovery, and her roots growing up as a Latina woman in Philadelphia. Past works include Barrio Grrrl! (a children's musical), 26 Miles (the story of an unlikely mother-daughter pairing fighting the American custody system), and In the Heights (about the Puerto-Rican immigrant community in NYC). Water by the Spoonful is in fact very autobiographical for Mrs. Hudes. Her protagonist, Elliot Ortiz, is quite literally based off of her real-life cousin, Elliot Ruiz, injured Iraq War veteran and Hollywood film actor (McCallum). In choosing to focus on addiction in Spoonful, Hudes also drew from her own life experience: "My interest in the topic stems out of family struggles with addiction and recovery. As a child it was painful to see some family members go through what was the crack epidemic in Philly. Some of them survived triumphantly and some of them didn’t. So I started with my family and I did a lot of interviews (Rao). Hudes' generation would have been teenagers during the crack epidemic in Philadelphia during the mid 1980s (Wikipedia), and experienced their parents and older friends dealing with the influx of the new drug, which is probably where Hudes gets her inspiration for the character Odessa Ortiz. Water By The Spoonful deals specifically with the aftermath of that epidemic today and the people in recovery that effectively ruined their lives and cut ties with their family during the epidemic.
After finishing her famed Elliot Trilogy, Hudes would like to move back towards her original inspiration and love of music. In her previous works, Quiara Alegría Hudes has used music as a background for the form and structure of her plays, a theme rather than an actual presence and character onstage, but that's the new direction she currently wants to move in. In August of 2012, she told The Brooklyn Rail that she's already planning her next project after The Happiest Song Plays Last finishes it's run at The Goodman Theatre. She's given the possible title of Daphne's Dive, and said that there will be a live pianist onstage throughout the performance. "I wanted to write a play where the set is a character. And music is alive in the world. It is as present as any character" (Gardley). In the meantime, Spoonful is getting it's West Coast premiere in Spring of 2014 at The Old Globe, in San Diego California to be directed by Eddie Torres, who directed Happiest Song this season at the Goodman (Cabrera). Hopefully her opportunities will continue to broaden and increase as success continues to be garnered for Spoonful, but in the meantime, Quiara Hudes is content to have the freedom to focus on new projects and spend time with her growing family at home.
Mrs. Hudes graduated cum laude from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in Music Composition and decided to pursue a professional career in music thereafter (Quiara.com). She recalls having some success at her musical career in New York, but always feeling like there was something missing. One day a producer friend of hers made a blunt criticism of her music saying "You know, you're music is good, but I'm not sure its great." Immediately Mrs. Hudes attributed the problem to the fact that she had never been able to find an individual voice in her music. "The question with music was, 'do I have something different to say?' because I was so fascinated and immersed in what other people had to say musically, whether it was Bach, whether it was Stevie Wonder, whether it was Etta James, I loved music and I loved what people had to say through it" (Hamilton). Quiara Hudes had been writing her entire life, she just never thought that it was something one could do as a career, until she actually tried it, and found that she never had the question of finding her own personal voice in her writing. She went on to study playwriting at Brown University under Paula Vogel, who became a major influence and mentor for Mrs. Hudes. Other influences include Tony Kushner, Sarah Ruhl, Annie Baker, and August Wilson (Sullivan). She currently lives with her husband Ray Beauchamp and two children in New York City and teaches playwriting at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT (Quiara.com).
In speaking about her synthesis between music and playwriting, Hudes talks about her process in writing her one-act play, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue, which became the first installment of her Elliot Trilogy, back in 2005: "I found a way to actually more literally include my musical interest, which is kind of exploring the musical structure of fugues, and applying that to an American story, and in this case the American story was about four Puerto Rican family members who had all served in the United States Marines (Hamilton)." She identifies the primary difference between writing music and writing plays in the fact that music transcends meaning and words convey meaning, but that her process is similar in working between the two mediums. When Mrs. Hudes first started composing music, she drew inspiration for her compositions from mistakes she made while practicing classical piano pieces such as Bach or Chopin. Hudes was fascinated by dissonance and said she "loved the way the wrong note sounded, and that is very similar with writing to me. I can plan out things to a T, I can really have a preconceived notion of where things are going, but its what surprises me when I'm actually writing, what comes out the wrong way or differently than I had expected that is really the direction I should be going in" (Hamilton).
The major themes of Hudes' work include family and community, roots and heritage, the pursuit and failure of the American dream, redemption and recovery, and her roots growing up as a Latina woman in Philadelphia. Past works include Barrio Grrrl! (a children's musical), 26 Miles (the story of an unlikely mother-daughter pairing fighting the American custody system), and In the Heights (about the Puerto-Rican immigrant community in NYC). Water by the Spoonful is in fact very autobiographical for Mrs. Hudes. Her protagonist, Elliot Ortiz, is quite literally based off of her real-life cousin, Elliot Ruiz, injured Iraq War veteran and Hollywood film actor (McCallum). In choosing to focus on addiction in Spoonful, Hudes also drew from her own life experience: "My interest in the topic stems out of family struggles with addiction and recovery. As a child it was painful to see some family members go through what was the crack epidemic in Philly. Some of them survived triumphantly and some of them didn’t. So I started with my family and I did a lot of interviews (Rao). Hudes' generation would have been teenagers during the crack epidemic in Philadelphia during the mid 1980s (Wikipedia), and experienced their parents and older friends dealing with the influx of the new drug, which is probably where Hudes gets her inspiration for the character Odessa Ortiz. Water By The Spoonful deals specifically with the aftermath of that epidemic today and the people in recovery that effectively ruined their lives and cut ties with their family during the epidemic.
After finishing her famed Elliot Trilogy, Hudes would like to move back towards her original inspiration and love of music. In her previous works, Quiara Alegría Hudes has used music as a background for the form and structure of her plays, a theme rather than an actual presence and character onstage, but that's the new direction she currently wants to move in. In August of 2012, she told The Brooklyn Rail that she's already planning her next project after The Happiest Song Plays Last finishes it's run at The Goodman Theatre. She's given the possible title of Daphne's Dive, and said that there will be a live pianist onstage throughout the performance. "I wanted to write a play where the set is a character. And music is alive in the world. It is as present as any character" (Gardley). In the meantime, Spoonful is getting it's West Coast premiere in Spring of 2014 at The Old Globe, in San Diego California to be directed by Eddie Torres, who directed Happiest Song this season at the Goodman (Cabrera). Hopefully her opportunities will continue to broaden and increase as success continues to be garnered for Spoonful, but in the meantime, Quiara Hudes is content to have the freedom to focus on new projects and spend time with her growing family at home.