The internet allows people to connect who never would have met each other before. People who live in opposite corners of the globe, from different backgrounds and cultures. The Pulitzer-Prize winning play Water By The Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes explores human connections on and offline. Western Michigan University will perform Water By The SpoonfulFebruary 10th through February 19th.
The play is the second in a three-part series by Hudes that follows an injured Iraq war veteran named Elliot Ortiz. Evan Lugo plays Elliot. He says life is not going well for the character. His mom is dying and he’s constantly reminded of the horrors of war.
“Every day he’s struggling with that and trying to find peace while also dealing with the reality that he did murder somebody,” says Lugo.
The only one Elliot can confide in is his cousin Yaz - a music professor going through a rough divorce. They both grew up in an impoverished Puerto Rican neighborhood in Philadelphia. Lugo says Elliot and Yaz have always dreamed of better lives.
“There’s just something more for him out there and he doesn’t want to get stuck in this loop that all of his other relatives are stuck in,” says Lugo.
But that’s only half the story in Water By The Spoonful. The play switches between Elliot and a chat room for recovering crack addicts.
The chat room brings people from all walks of life together - not just people dealing with poverty.
“People who are making $300,000 a year and up are just as addicted as these stereotypes that we have of who is really doing crack," says Director Mark Liermann. “And the struggle that these people go through just to survive and stay clean.”
Elizabeth Clary plays an addict on the chat room with the username Orangutan.
“She was adopted when she was only a few days old from Japan and then she was moved to Cape Lewiston, Maine where there aren’t any real minorities there,” says Clary.
Clary says this left Orangutan feeling lonely and disconnected from her culture. But through the chat room, she finally finds someone she can relate to - a user called Chutes And Ladders.
Liermann says the play gives a fascinating look into how we interact online.
“When I talk to my students, my sons - they fully believe and are as invested in these electronic relationships as my generation, as we were/are in our supposed ‘real’ relationships,” he says.
Playwright Quiara Hudes admits that Water By The Spoonful is not an easy play to produce. After all - how do you show a chat room on stage? First there’s the set. Liermann says Western’s theatre department stretched large rolls of clear plastic wrap across the stage to symbolize the web:
“A really beautiful visual as the lights hit it and it’s see-through so that you that you can still have actors be seen through it at points when you’re seeing it from the side. The projections come through it from the back. It’s different from other places in the house because it’s a three-dimensional sculpture.”
Then, there’s the acting. Here the playwright is very clear - actors are not to look at cell phones or type on laptops. Instead each of the four characters sits in separate corners facing the middle of the stage, having what almost looks like a regular conversation - except that the actors aren’t allowed to make eye contact with each other.
“The questions they’re asking, the seeking of human connection is very real and very painful, right? And to do that without having somebody else literally looking back at you is a challenge,” says Liermann.
Though they seem like two totally different plots - Elliot’s struggle to find himself and the addicts in the chat room - there is a connection and it ties the whole play together. Liermann says you’ll have to see it to find out.
