Theatre in Review: Water by the Spoonful (Second Stage Theatre)Quiara Alegría Hudes provides drama by the bushelful in Water by the Spoonful, even if she doesn't quite know what to do with it. Leading the play's parade of troubled souls is Yaz, who at 31 is beset by a litany of disappointments: a frustrated composer with a failed marriage and a non-tenure-track academic job, she has no clear direction forward. Elliot, her cousin and best friend, is loaded with scars -- both physical and psychological -- from his tour in the Iraq War. He spends his days hustling for acting jobs, filling orders at Subway, and caring for his aunt (and de facto mother), who is dying. Hudes also tosses in Odessa, who, under the handle Haikumom, is the administrator of a chatroom for crack addicts. Let's just say she knows whereof she chats. This virtual space maintained by Odessa is irregularly inhabited by Orangutan, a Japanese adoptee who grew up, feeling thoroughly alienated, in Maine ("where in all my days I have witnessed one other Asian -- in the Superfresh deli counter"), and Chutes and Ladders, a middle-aged IRS employee whose family vanished while he was lost in a haze of smoke. Don't expect compassion; this bunch is a notably tough audience: When a new guy, Fountainhead, shows up -- he's a computer programmer and entrepreneur from the Main Line -- they have little use for his pretensions. "Speaking of experts," Chutes and Ladders wonders, "I've been meaning to become an asshole. Can you teach me how?" Odessa's attempts at censoring their more profane pronouncements have remarkably little effect. As Hudes demonstrates throughout Water by the Spoonful, she has a knack for the kind of wryly funny observation that takes note, lightly but firmly, of the messes her characters have made of their lives. Yaz, taking deadly aim at her WASPy ex-husband, notes, "He had Quaker Oats in his DNA." Offering his own brand of comfort, Elliot tells her that she and her ex "are the dog and the owner that look like each other." Unimpressed by Fountainhead's too-casual confessions, Chutes and Ladders says, "You sound like the kind of guy who's read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, cover to cover." Offering an inventory of his good points, he adds, "I'm 50 years old on a good day, I eat three-and-a-half donuts for breakfast and save the remaining half for brunch. I have small hands, six toes on my left foot, and my face resembles a corgi." It isn't until the last line of the first act that Hudes lets drop the connection between Yaz and Elliot (and their epically unhappy Puerto Rican family) and Odessa and her digital tribe. Until then, you have to take it on faith that the playwright is going to make something dramatic out of this disparate collection of characters. It's a faith that is only partially rewarded. The second act begins compellingly with a confrontation that exposes the details of Elliot's chaotic upbringing; we also learn that there is much more to Odessa than the kindly ringleader of a bunch of wisecracking addicts. A powerful family drama begins to assemble before our eyes. But Water by the Spoonful never settles on an organizing principle, and Hudes allows herself to jump from narrative to narrative, letting her characters express themselves at length while arranging them into a triptych display -- meant to display the healing powers of compassion -- without making any of them vivid enough to matter. It's especially odd that Hudes spends so much time on Orangutan, who has run off to Japan, ostensibly to be a language teacher but really to track down her birth parents, and who spends most of her time goading Chutes and Ladders to throw over his life and join her on the other side of the world. (This seems like the plot of a different play altogether.) Equally frustrating is the portrait of Elliot, who, by all rights, should be the lead character, but the playwright has surprisingly little to say about his addiction problems and war wounds. Elliot does have one of those all-purpose ghost characters that seem to haunt veterans in plays like this, but it's just one more point that is brought up without being developed into anything meaningful. Similarly stranded are Yaz, whose role as the big achiever in a family stained by tragedy is left unexamined, and Fountainhead, who is little more than a cardboard cutout of a white collar crackhead. (For the real thing, see the horrific portrait of a similar character in Dael Orlandersmith's Horsedreams, staged last season at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre.) Under Davis McCallum's well-paced direction, the cast makes the most of Hudes' sharply funny lines, avoiding more complex questions that, in any case, won't be answered in the script. Zabryna Guevara's Yaz is a nice study in exasperation, which clearly hides a multitude of sorrows; she also has a nice speech about the allure of John Coltrane's music. As Elliot, Armando Riesco has an especially charming moment while demonstrating the dental charm that landed him a Spanish-language television commercial for toothpaste; if he can't make a coherent character out of the thin material offered by the playwright, it's not really his fault. Liza Colón-Zayas is such a tower of strength as Odessa that her eleventh-hour crisis of the soul is hard to credit. Similarly, Bill Heck deftly handles Fountainhead's self-deceptive ways, but he barely exists as a character, and his late-in-the-play change of heart seems to come from nowhere. As Orangutan and Chutes and Ladders, Sue Jean Kim and Frankie Faison both seem awfully perky; you'd never know that they had ever been harrowed by the constant need for crack. Neil Patel's rather mystifying set surrounds any number of locations with walls seemingly made of stone and covered with lichens; it is apparently a reference to the play's finale, which takes place in the rainforest of Puerto Rico, but you won't know that until the last ten minutes or so. In any case, it provides a good surface for Aaron Rhyne's subtly rendered projections of flowers, leaves, and other scene-setting imagery; he also provides amusing icons for each of the online characters. Russell H. Champa's lighting includes some interesting backlighting effects built into the set. Joshua Schmidt's sound design blends some tasty jazz excerpts (Coltrane's "A Love Supreme") with computer ringtones, gunshots, and other effects. Esosa's costumes help to suggest the vast differences in the characters' ages and social stations. Water by the Spoonful surprised many people last spring when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Because it had only a brief production at Hartford Stage, this suggests that it reads better than it plays, but surely its scattered structure must have been evident even on the page. In any case, it's hard not to feel that the members of the Pulitzer committee have done no favors for this young and talented playwright. Many people attending Water by the Spoonful expecting to see a major award-winning drama are likely to be disappointed, and not without reason.--David Barbour 
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