the play In Trilogy:
Photo by Richard Termine - Second Stage Theatre, 2013
Water By The Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes is the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for drama. It is second in Hudes' "The Elliot Trilogy," detailing the life of her continuing protagonist Elliot Ortiz, injured Iraq war vet. Her first installment, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, details Elliot's journey returning from Iraq and the constant question of whether or not to go back, included in three generations of Ortiz' stories fighting in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Water By The Spoonful takes us back to Elliot's hometown in North Philly, and adds the stories of his cousin Yazmin and his birth mother Odessa, the mother figure to an online network of recovering crack addicts. The Happiest Song Plays Last premiered at The Goodman Theatre, Chicago, IL, on April 13th, 2013, and follows Elliot into an ancient Jordanian town on a Hollywood Film set, and Yaz into a new role as the heart and hope of the North Philly barrio that used to be their home (Quiara.com).
The World of Water By The Spoonful :
Water By The Spoonful stretches from Philadelphia across America all the way to Japan and Puerto Rico, and deals with themes of addiction and recovery from more than just substances, family estrangement and strangers becoming families online, and the forgiveness and reclamation of our roots through nature. Hudes uses Coltrane free-jazz as inspiration for form, and is based off of widespread interviews she conducted with family members, experts on addiction and others (Hartford Stage). For Ms. Hudes, this play is about "the difference between the family we're born with and the family we find. Within these families these people are facing many obstacles, of course, such as figuring out what their place in the world is, why they're punishing themselves, why they can't forgive other people, figuring out who they will fall in love with, figuring out who they will never talk to again. And they're all recovering, in some way or another (Hartford Stage)." In this world, everyone is in recovery. Our protagonist, Elliot Ortiz, is in recovery from his time spent as a marine in the Iraq War and the serious injury that left him with a painful limp, the addiction he developed to prescription drugs after his injury, and the fresh loss of the woman who raised him, Aunt Ginny. His birth mother, Odessa Ortiz, aka "Haikumom," is in recovery from her addiction to crack cocaine, her sister's recent passing, her responsibility for her infant daughter's death, and the broken relationship between her and Elliot. These two central characters both represent the family split within the play that devolves into two separate and isolated communities: Odessa's online chat form for fellow recovering crackheads from all over the world, and Elliot and his cousin (really more like a sister) Yazmin Ortiz, a professor of music at Swarthmore College who's marriage to a privileged white partner is falling apart (Hudes).
The inspiration for this play came out of Hudes' own experience with her cousin returning from Iraq and addiction within her family. Shortly after Ellitot returned from Iraq, Quiara went to visit him on a military base and recalls how the change she saw within him was so unclassifiable: "I just remember the instant I saw him there was just something changed in his eye. He was absolutely still the same young clown of a cousin I had always known and grown up with loving. But there was something different, and I felt that I might never understand it (Lunden)" In the same interview broadcast through NPR, Armando Riesco, the actor who originated the role of Elliot Ortiz, comments on finding during his research on online chat forums for Iraq veterans "The very first story that I found there was a twenty four year old marine, that came back with a leg injury, that was working dead end job, that just did not know what to do with his anger. I thought, there's a lot of this out there (Lunden)." In Spoonful, Elliot is literally haunted by his experience in Iraq by an Arabic ghost that incessantly repeats the same sentence roughly translating to "Can I please have my passport back?" (Hudes). The relationship to the Ghost character in Spoonful not only brings in elements of the supernatural and divine but brings up constant questions of identity and a self left back in Iraq that is literally represented through identification papers lost in a foreign country. Identity and roots of course are themes that go hand in hand with community and family in this play, manifesting in all of these characters in different ways.
Going back to the overarching theme of recovery, identify and roots are reclaimed and defined by the families within this play and how these people recover from either breaking with their families or mending those schisms. Elliot finds his freedom and recovery through breaking ties with his family and embarking on a new journey to pursue his dream of becoming a Hollywood film actor, whereas Yazmin finds her freedom and recovery from her marriage through the literal reclamation of her roots in purchasing the house that her and Elliot grew up in, and taking on the role of the new Aunty Ginny in the North Philly Barrio. And each recovery in this play is specifically tied to a natural image. With Elliot and Yaz that image is of the mythical homeland of Puerto Rico and the El Yunque Rainforest where Aunt Ginny specifically wanted her ashes spread. The water imagery in the play stems out of the idea of motherhood and care taking, as well as redemption and rebirth. "Water by the spoonful" literally refers to the remedy for stomach flu Odessa fails to administer to her two children as a result of her crack addiction, resulting in the death of her infant daughter, which she is unable to forgive herself for. Later in the play this image is again resounded by Odessa pouring spoonfuls of water onto her floor as a symbol for overdose and a failure of herself and her family once again years after her proclaimed "recovery." The image above of Odessa and Fountainhead in the bathtub in the last scene of the play was perhaps the most moving and tender moment of the whole play. John/Fountainhead is distant in every way from Odessa. He's white, privileged, with an intact family and supportive job, and yet he eventually becomes a family for her and literally "washes her of her sins," in an evoked Pieta image.
The play is not realistic. It happens within a sort of liminal stage space that must be able to represent the constructs of an online chat room, a Subway sandwich shop, a boxing gym, Odessa's dilapidated apartment, a Japenese train station, and the rolling hills of the El Yunque Rainforest in Puerto Rico. Hudes has never thought of herself as a conventional playwright: "I've never particularly felt identified with the mainstream. Simply being multicultural makes me feel like an observer..." (Hamilton), therefore it comes as no surprise that she does not use Aristotelean form to tell this story. With John Coltrane as structural inspiration, she describes the structure of Spoonful as "a longer journey with a lot of diversion on the way, a lot of swooping back and forth, a lot of improvisation returning to theme" (Hartford Stage). In her playwright's notes in Spoonful under music, Hudes' specifically names two Coltrane pieces: "A Love Supreme," and, "Ascension." "A Love Supreme" is Hudes' metaphorical structure for the sublime in her play, "Ascension" for the noise (Hudes). The sublime in Spoonful comes through references to divinity specifically through redemption and nature, and the noise comes in the cacophony of anger and polarization be it on the chat room against the new privileged outsider "Fountainhead", or between Odessa and Elliot over funeral arrangements. Her structure mirrors the isolation and dissonance she so loves about Coltrane's music, especially in the staging of the online chat rooms where characters are all on stage with each other talking to each other, but are actually thousands of miles away from each other and have no idea what the other people looks like or much of anything about their personal lives.
When asked about the relevance of this play, Hudes' states: "As I was writing it I had this feeling that it was...it felt like this is the world I live in. A world where someone from a part of the planet that I have no experience with, where that person and I are in the room together and we have to figure out what is our relationship to each other. It's about what's universal and what gets lost in translation" (Hartford Stage). This phenomenon is most clearly outlines in Hudes' staged adaptation of the online chat forum, and a distanced family of strangers who are all nursing each other back to health and their own agency for redemption. This play is especially salient today in talking about addiction and recovery not only with crack cocaine and the wide-reach of that phenomenon's ability to break class, racial, and social distinctions, and in bringing awareness to the influx of returning marines and how they reintegrate into society. America is just beginning to pull out concretely from a twelve year war that was not only politically controversial and economically debilitating, but that claimed the lives of thousands of young men and women, even after they return home alive and physically well. We do not yet have an effective infrastructure in place in this country to help those people reclaim their lives and their roots in America. It deals with outsiders and isolated communities who do not normally have a voice but are victimized and pushed aside by the social structures of how this country functions, and offers a clear metaphorical and actual way out for it's characters from their experiences of anger and loss.
The inspiration for this play came out of Hudes' own experience with her cousin returning from Iraq and addiction within her family. Shortly after Ellitot returned from Iraq, Quiara went to visit him on a military base and recalls how the change she saw within him was so unclassifiable: "I just remember the instant I saw him there was just something changed in his eye. He was absolutely still the same young clown of a cousin I had always known and grown up with loving. But there was something different, and I felt that I might never understand it (Lunden)" In the same interview broadcast through NPR, Armando Riesco, the actor who originated the role of Elliot Ortiz, comments on finding during his research on online chat forums for Iraq veterans "The very first story that I found there was a twenty four year old marine, that came back with a leg injury, that was working dead end job, that just did not know what to do with his anger. I thought, there's a lot of this out there (Lunden)." In Spoonful, Elliot is literally haunted by his experience in Iraq by an Arabic ghost that incessantly repeats the same sentence roughly translating to "Can I please have my passport back?" (Hudes). The relationship to the Ghost character in Spoonful not only brings in elements of the supernatural and divine but brings up constant questions of identity and a self left back in Iraq that is literally represented through identification papers lost in a foreign country. Identity and roots of course are themes that go hand in hand with community and family in this play, manifesting in all of these characters in different ways.
Going back to the overarching theme of recovery, identify and roots are reclaimed and defined by the families within this play and how these people recover from either breaking with their families or mending those schisms. Elliot finds his freedom and recovery through breaking ties with his family and embarking on a new journey to pursue his dream of becoming a Hollywood film actor, whereas Yazmin finds her freedom and recovery from her marriage through the literal reclamation of her roots in purchasing the house that her and Elliot grew up in, and taking on the role of the new Aunty Ginny in the North Philly Barrio. And each recovery in this play is specifically tied to a natural image. With Elliot and Yaz that image is of the mythical homeland of Puerto Rico and the El Yunque Rainforest where Aunt Ginny specifically wanted her ashes spread. The water imagery in the play stems out of the idea of motherhood and care taking, as well as redemption and rebirth. "Water by the spoonful" literally refers to the remedy for stomach flu Odessa fails to administer to her two children as a result of her crack addiction, resulting in the death of her infant daughter, which she is unable to forgive herself for. Later in the play this image is again resounded by Odessa pouring spoonfuls of water onto her floor as a symbol for overdose and a failure of herself and her family once again years after her proclaimed "recovery." The image above of Odessa and Fountainhead in the bathtub in the last scene of the play was perhaps the most moving and tender moment of the whole play. John/Fountainhead is distant in every way from Odessa. He's white, privileged, with an intact family and supportive job, and yet he eventually becomes a family for her and literally "washes her of her sins," in an evoked Pieta image.
The play is not realistic. It happens within a sort of liminal stage space that must be able to represent the constructs of an online chat room, a Subway sandwich shop, a boxing gym, Odessa's dilapidated apartment, a Japenese train station, and the rolling hills of the El Yunque Rainforest in Puerto Rico. Hudes has never thought of herself as a conventional playwright: "I've never particularly felt identified with the mainstream. Simply being multicultural makes me feel like an observer..." (Hamilton), therefore it comes as no surprise that she does not use Aristotelean form to tell this story. With John Coltrane as structural inspiration, she describes the structure of Spoonful as "a longer journey with a lot of diversion on the way, a lot of swooping back and forth, a lot of improvisation returning to theme" (Hartford Stage). In her playwright's notes in Spoonful under music, Hudes' specifically names two Coltrane pieces: "A Love Supreme," and, "Ascension." "A Love Supreme" is Hudes' metaphorical structure for the sublime in her play, "Ascension" for the noise (Hudes). The sublime in Spoonful comes through references to divinity specifically through redemption and nature, and the noise comes in the cacophony of anger and polarization be it on the chat room against the new privileged outsider "Fountainhead", or between Odessa and Elliot over funeral arrangements. Her structure mirrors the isolation and dissonance she so loves about Coltrane's music, especially in the staging of the online chat rooms where characters are all on stage with each other talking to each other, but are actually thousands of miles away from each other and have no idea what the other people looks like or much of anything about their personal lives.
When asked about the relevance of this play, Hudes' states: "As I was writing it I had this feeling that it was...it felt like this is the world I live in. A world where someone from a part of the planet that I have no experience with, where that person and I are in the room together and we have to figure out what is our relationship to each other. It's about what's universal and what gets lost in translation" (Hartford Stage). This phenomenon is most clearly outlines in Hudes' staged adaptation of the online chat forum, and a distanced family of strangers who are all nursing each other back to health and their own agency for redemption. This play is especially salient today in talking about addiction and recovery not only with crack cocaine and the wide-reach of that phenomenon's ability to break class, racial, and social distinctions, and in bringing awareness to the influx of returning marines and how they reintegrate into society. America is just beginning to pull out concretely from a twelve year war that was not only politically controversial and economically debilitating, but that claimed the lives of thousands of young men and women, even after they return home alive and physically well. We do not yet have an effective infrastructure in place in this country to help those people reclaim their lives and their roots in America. It deals with outsiders and isolated communities who do not normally have a voice but are victimized and pushed aside by the social structures of how this country functions, and offers a clear metaphorical and actual way out for it's characters from their experiences of anger and loss.