New Ground Theatre Festival: Writer Quiara Alegria Hudes finds inspiration high and low

water.jpgMatthew Boston and Liza Colon-Zayas in the world premiere of "Water by the Spoonful" at the Hartford Stage in 2011.
PREVIEW

Daphne's Dive

What: The Cleveland Play House presents the first annual Roe Green Award new play reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, directed by Laura Kepley. It is part of the New Ground Theatre Festival.

When: 4 p.m. Saturday, May 5.

Where: The Play House's Helen Rosenfeld Lewis Bialosky Lab Theatre, PlayhouseSquare, Cleveland.

Tickets: Pay-what-you-can. Go to clevelandplayhouse.com or call 216-241-6000.

Call it prescience, exquisitely good taste or a combination of both.

When a Cleveland Play House committee headed up by artistic director Michael Bloom selected Quiara Alegría Hudes as the winner of the first Roe Green Award in January -- with a $7,500 cash prize and a weeklong residency in PlayhouseSquare culminating in the public reading of a new script -- they had no idea that months later, the 34-year-old playwright would make history.

In April, Hudes won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for drama for her play "Water by the Spoonful," an impressive coup for a work that had its world premiere at Hartford Stage but had yet to be produced in New York.

The second part of a trilogy featuring Elliot, a Marine injured in Iraq, the play probably will open in New York this fall. (Part one, "Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue," premiered off-Broadway to blazingly good reviews in 2006 when Hudes was only 28. The third part, "The Happiest Song Plays Last," is slated to open at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in April 2013.)

Hudes landed in Cleveland late Tuesday and didn't waste any time -- she was up at 4 a.m. Wednesday, banging out 20 fresh pages for her actors, who would read the script, "Daphne's Dive," for the first time that afternoon in a rehearsal room in the Middough Building.

The play is set in a bar in North Philadelphia, a historically Puerto Rican neighborhood, and spans two decades. Hudes was born and raised in West Philly, a distinction as important as whether you're from the East Side of Cleveland or the West. (Today, she lives in Washington Heights, N.Y., with her husband, Ray Beauchamp, and 5-year-old daughter Cecilia).

She's brought some A-list performers with her to test drive her "brand spanking new" work: Liza Colon-Zayas, who played Odessa, a former crack addict who runs an online recovery group in "Water by the Spoonful," and Liza's husband, David Zayas, whom "Dexter" aficionados will recognize as the burly, Hawaiian-shirted Detective Angel Bastista on the Showtime series.

But first things first: What was it like to nab a Pulitzer? "It was good," Hudes said, cracking a small smile. "Really good."

To celebrate, the low-key artist and her husband "did nothing together." He took a day off work. They had brunch and saw a play. When they got home, friends poured in, toting champagne. Three weeks later, "there's still champagne in our fridge," she said.

She more than earned that cache of bubbly. "Water by the Spoonful" is an unforgettable work that engages head and heart, grabbing you from the first few pages and never letting go, its grip tightening with each finely crafted scene. "Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue" is smaller and more contained -- it features four actors and is "written and structured like a Bach fugue," said Hudes, who earned a degree in music at Yale before getting her master's in fine arts in playwriting from Brown.

She wanted a freer, more wide-ranging score to dictate the language, rhythm and scope of "Water," and chose jazz as her muse. The play is set in Philadelphia, San Diego, various cities in Japan and Puerto Rico. But much of its power lies in the virtual world and the smart, crackling language that flies between the members of recovertogether.com, users with names like Haikumom, Chutes&ladders and Orangutan.

Whether chatting online or face to face, they sound like real people talking. That's because Hudes does field research to help inform her characters.

"I really like interviewing for plays," she said, taking a break after three hours of rehearsal Wednesday. "I just love the way people talk, and so in 'Water by the Spoonful,' I interviewed family members but I also widened the circle and interviewed recovery counselors and policymakers regarding addiction. I just cast a slightly wider net, and it influenced the play."

In "Daphne's Dive," as in her trilogy, the locals who populate her bar are based on people she knows, and though the story is fictional, their spirits infuse every line.

"They're a motley crew of the different types in this neighborhood, and it's what happens to them over the course of 20 years," she said. There is "a very charismatic and successful businessman, the warm but emotionally reserved bartender, a bombastic and tortured painter, a manual laborer who cuts glass at the factory down the street. And they all overlap at different points in their lives."

Drawing inspiration from her own life and weaving it into compelling fiction has been a constant for Hudes. She really does have a cousin Elliot, who was a Marine wounded in Iraq. And he really did go to Jordan to be a consultant on a war movie, then wind up starring in the flick when the lead got fired. His journey is the basis for the final installment of her trilogy. ("I said, 'How can I not turn this into a play? I've got to dramatize this -- this is too good to be true!' ")

Though she isn't a fan of "porous" labels like comedy and drama, despite some dark themes, she's prepared to call her new play funny. She located it in the rich soil of North Philly because "Puerto Ricans are citizens" yet "outsiders in their own country." That idea intrigued her. So did the area's socioeconomic makeup. "Like if my family is any representation, you get people that are entrenched below the poverty line . . . but now I live in a nice place in Washington Heights."

Hudes was the first in her family to go to college. That she ended up at an Ivy was "beginner's luck," she said.

"I think there's something about that diversity within one family that I actually find very American, and I like tapping into that -- the high and low in the one family tree. And I just never read tales about a neighborhood like that."

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