WATER BY THE SPOONFUL

About the show

Water by the Spoonful is an exciting new play from the playwright behind the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights. Elliot Ortiz is back in the States after serving in Iraq, reconnecting with family and starting a new life. At the same time, four strangers in an internet chat room seek support to face demons of their own, and soon the real world and the virtual one start to intersect in unexpected ways. Water by the Spoonful is the second play in Hudes’Elliot Cycle, three stand-alone plays written over an eight-year period. Each play uses a different kind of music—Bach, Coltrane, and Puerto Rican folk music—to trace the coming of age of a bright but haunted young Puerto Rican man. The first in the trilogy, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, which follows the title character as he returns to Philadelphia from serving in Iraq, debuted with Page 73 Productions and Culture Project and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Water by the Spoonful made its world premiere at Hartford Stage and played Off Broadway at Second Stage Theatre, winning the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The final play, The Happiest Song Plays Last, which opened Off Broadway in February 2014 at Second Stage Theatre, explores Elliot’s journey towards peace and purpose as a lucky break in film and a cousin a half a world away put the realities of life into sharp focus.