"Water By the Spoonful' in New York

Four people sit on stage, exchanging casual banter. They appear to know each other well, but they're not making eye contact.

Are they together? Apparently not, even though they occupy the same space (an empty stage, a sofa here, a desk there). Where are they? Who are they? Their names are strange, like codes or names in a board game.

What is this play about?

Deep into Act I of Quiara Alegria Hudes's beautiful new play, Water By The Spoonful, it becomes apparent that this is no ordinary gathering of souls in a conventional meeting place. On the contrary, these are lonely humans connecting in cyber-space, in a chat room, and the tie that binds them is the use of crack cocaine, an addiction that is ruining their lives.

A young Japanese-American woman (online name, "Orangutan"), a middle-aged African-American ("Chutes & Ladders"), and their Puerto Rican-American online "site administrator" ("Haiku-mom") are soon joined by a young white businessman ("Fountainhead"), and the conversation shifts to orienting the newcomer to the struggles he will face"“ struggles they are facing, too.

Back from Iraq

To complicate matters (and plot-lines) even further, the chat room scenes alternate with a parallel dialogue elsewhere between two Puerto Rican-American cousins in Philadelphia. Elliott has just returned from combat in Iraq; he works in a Subway sandwich shop to make ends meet. Though he dreams of becoming an actor, he remains in Philadelphia to care for his ailing aunt, Ginny, who raised him.

Meanwhile, Elliott struggles with addiction to painkillers that he takes from a leg wound he suffered in Iraq. These painkillers can't seem to protect him from the ghost that haunts him nightly: that of an Iraqi civilian he may have mistakenly killed.

Elliott's only source of support is his lovely, upwardly mobile cousin Yaz, with whom he was raised. She now teaches at Swarthmore, and though she's too busy to share the caretaking of their aunt, she provides Elliott with much-needed affection and support.

It all sounds plot-heavy and complicated at first. But Hudes weaves these two stories skillfully together into one rich tapestry of forgiveness and redemption.

Authentic characters

The two story lines intersect in Act II, when Aunt Ginny dies and her family is notified. As it happens, Haiku-mom, the online site administrator, turns out to be Odessa, Aunt Ginny's sister. And Odessa turns out to be Elliott's mother, who abandoned him when he was a child as a result of her addiction. These revelations (and others) provoke a face-to-face confrontation between mother (Haiku-mom) and son (Elliott), throwing them both into deeper crisis.

What unfolds is the stuff of which great family dramas are made. For indeed, the chat room has become a family, whose members provide each other with crucial attention, challenging each other when they relapse, urging each other to start the first day of recovery again.

These characters are authentic (drawn from real life, the playwright has acknowledged) and their crises are deep and real. Fountainhead's wife is bi-polar. He hides from his marital problems by using crack, thereby neglecting his child. Chutes & Ladders has been estranged from his own son for ten years, and is barred from any contact with his three grandsons, whom he hasn't even met. And yet, as the play digs deeper into the crises of addiction, the ties bind stronger between those who suffer from it.

Flight to Japan

Ultimately, the gift that this new playwright (author of In the Heights) gives us is an honest, humorous and uplifting play about a deadly serious topic. But Water By the Spoonful isn't only about addiction. It's also about defining family in a new, meaningful way.

In one scene, Orangutan (the Japanese girl) begs Chutes & Ladders (the middle-aged African-American) to fly to Japan to meet her. She's been stranded there after an unsuccessful attempt to meet her birth parents, and she's afraid of relapsing. Chutes & Ladders sells his car and takes the flight, breaking through the self-absorption and isolation that addiction imposes, in an effort to connect with another human being.

Hudes leads her characters through the valley of death into the "land of the living," as one character acknowledges at the end "“ by having them help one another.

In O'Neill's footsteps

Hudes covers a lot of ground in this, the second in her trilogy of plays about the Ortiz family. As such, Hudes takes her place alongside American authors like Eugene O'Neill, Horton Foote and Langford Wilson, who followed families they loved through one play after another.

I don't know about you, but I, for one, am weary of contemporary plays about dysfunctional families who are sensationalized, and, worse, abandoned at the end by the cynical playwright. Water by the Spoonful takes us instead to a new place called hope. It portrays an extended family, ravaged by tragedy, that nevertheless struggles to prevail— with courage, honesty and that precious commodity called love.