Lyric Stage Company, Boston
Written by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Director Scott Edmiston
Set, Richard Wadsworth Chambers; Costumes, Elisabetta Polito; Lights, Karen Perlow; Sound design/composer, Dewey Dellay; Video, Amelia Gossett.
November 15, 2013
This is not your average theater production. The cast is Hispanic, black, Asian, and white. The setting is split between an online chat room and real-time family drama. Until the second act unfolds it appears to be two plays, interesting but fragmented. Where the heck is playwright Queria Alegria Hudes headed and what’s the point, you wonder.
Like a street performer in Harvard Square, Hudes starts out juggling three balls, then four, then five, then adds a few plates, a bowling pin and a kitchen knife to the mix. Can she pull it off, and will anyone get hurt are the two questions come to mind. After two hours and 15 minutes, you’re ready to dig into your pocket to give her, the cast and production team of “Water by the Spoonful” a tip.
One chunk of the play revolves around two twenty something Hispanic American cousins Elliot Ortiz (Gabriel Roderiguez) and Yazmin Ortiz (Sasha Castroverde). The two cousins mothers are sisters. Sasha’s mother has just died, and their family is already fighting over her furniture. Elliot, a wounded Marine veteran, has a dead end job in a sub shop in Philadelphia and dreams of heading to Los Angeles to become a Latino movie star. The stage bond they forge feels authentic, forged in their own Puerto Rican family’s assimilation into American life.
The other chunk recreates an online chat room dedicated to helping its members steer clear of crack cocaine. These are broken people struggling to get through life a day at a time. Separated geographically and culturally, they are joined at the hip via computer.
The set deserves its own credit. Spare, a few plastic chairs, a plastic table, a desktop computer is all that’s necessary. During the online chats, a spotlight illuminates the participants who talk to each other’s online presence, no pretense of keypads or laptops, just people trying to get past the day without getting fired or high. These characters could not be more different. What they have in common is the will, often tested, to survive.
Theresa Nguyen, Johnny Lee Davenport* in Water by the Spoonful. Photo by Mark S. Howard.
Eight plasma screens hang over the simple set show who’s online or photographs or fuzzy videos representing an aspect of the play. We are so used to looking at IPads, iPhone and laptops that we don’t think twice about glancing at the video screens in our vision of the play. At its best, we can’t distinguish between what’s more powerful, the virtual or the real world, as both worlds tug at the characters.
Fountainhead (Gabriel Kutner) is a businessman whose crack habit cost him a job and perhaps a marriage. Orangutan (Therese Ngyuyen) is a young Japanese American searching for a mother in Japan who gave her away to an orphanage. Chutes&Ladders (Johnny Lee Davenport) is a fiftyish IRS bureaucrat trying to break out of self imposed isolation and guilt at losing his family when he got addicted to crack. You feel them.
They have become friends, virtual friends but with loyalties as thick as any real time friendship. They log on daily, know each other’s back story and aren’t shy about offering advice and tough love. The chat room moderator, Odessa (Mariela Lopez-Ponce), a recovering addict of seven years, keeps the chats civil. Her moniker of HaikuMom, the grounded one, is deserved. She’s the glue that holds it together. She also has the most disturbing secret, a secret that embroils and enables (in the best sense) all of them by the play’s conclusion.
Hudes brilliantly pulls the disparate threads together in Act Two. It’s not pretty but it is rewarding. This story of recovery and redemption couldn’t have been written by a playwright who didn’t love the Philadelpia environment in which Elliot, Yazmin and Odessa grew up and characters like those fragile members of HaikuMom’s chatroom.
By the play’s conclusion, you’re rooting for all of them. They may or may not make it but they’ve taken the first step toward a world where their lives transcend zeroes and ones.
Nice piece, pt. I'd love to have seen this production with you.
Posted by: Joni McGary | November 19, 2013 at 12:29 AM