Overlapping spaces and identities in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful: a metatheatrical approach

Abstract

This article discusses the overlapping relationship between setting diversification and character creation as experimented by Puerto Rican American playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes (1977–) in her metatheatrical drama Water by the Spoonful (2011). The play, which emerges in a second chronological order in Hudes’s so-called Elliot Trilogy, presents diasporic characters of different ethnicities and mixed cultural backgrounds as operating interactively within three different, though intersecting, realms or spaces: the real world, virtual cyberspace, and metaphysical space. The real world of the play features interacting Puerto Rican Americans, Japanese Americans, African Americans, and White Americans in a way that highlights their ethnocultural diversity in real American, Puerto Rican, and Japanese settings. Some of these binational, bilingual, and bicultural characters, who belong to different generations (20 s, 30 s, 40 s, 50 s), also occupy, and actually favor, the virtual realm or cyberspace of the internet where they assume unreal identities but negotiate real issues spurred by real life circumstances and reveal secrets about themselves and their families through online group therapy sessions. The metaphysical space is used as a magical realist element and is exclusively reserved by Hudes for exposing her Puerto Rican American characters’ restless spiritual and mental struggle with the obsessive feelings of nostalgia, homesickness, regret, and displacement. The three realms or spaces intersect and collide in a way that determines the social attitudes and psychological moods of diasporic characters.