Poster courtesy of Spectrum Theatre Company
Honesty hurts. Not the honesty of cruel truths said with harshness, but the honesty of exposing your entire soul to another person, even though it’s so hard. The honesty that makes you furious, sad, ashamed and strong. I admire that in a person. I want that for myself.
This weekend, Spectrum Theatre Company’s production of Water by the Spoonful pulled at me and forced me to look. It was the most beautifully honest thing I’d seen that day, and maybe this whole quarter.
In Water by the Spoonful, cousins Yaz (played by Communication junior Lily Santiago) and Elliot (played by Communication freshman Freddy Mauricio) are best friends that banter as fast as thought. They spend most of Act 1 discussing their crazy Puerto Rican family and processing the death of Elliot’s adoptive mom, Ginny.
Meanwhile, Odessa (played by Communication sophomore Ziare Paul-Emile) rules over a virtual world – a crack-cocaine addiction recovery chatroom. She is the moderator for the feisty Orangutan (played by Communication freshman Grace Dolezal-Ng), the gloomy Chutes & Ladders (played by Communication sophomore Elliot Sagay) and the pretentious Fountainhead (played by Communication sophomore Noah Watkins), all named for their site usernames.
The worlds collide and break open in Act 2, when we realize Odessa is Elliot’s birth mom who has been giving more care to virtual relationships than her flesh and blood. Orangutan tries to find the courage to meet her birth parents in Japan, while an overly cautious and scared Chutes & Ladders warns her that caring ultimately just hurts you. Yaz tries to make sense of who Odessa is, while Fountainhead makes the huge leap of going offline to help his moderator. In the final scenes, Elliot defeats his looming PTSD (a ghost played by Communication junior Alex Milinazzo) and helps Yaz release Ginny’s ashes into a waterfall.
I struggled between two modes of considering this show – like an analyst parsing the coolest piece of English class material ever or like a binge-watcher of Netflix show I literally couldn’t stop streaming.
Are online connections real, and do they matter to their participants? Water’s technical team addressed a thought-provoking question in a graceful and effective way. Instead of working with gimmicky typing motions or having the actors sit behind screens, the production set each actor on their own platform block, with individual lighting and sounds to effortlessly indicate coming online or even getting censored by the moderator. And when an actor crossed to another block while still remaining in the chatroom scenario, I could feel the scene get ten times more intense. The movement and set design combined to say yes, online connections do matter, because human emotions can’t be stopped by screens.
In a less analytical way and in terms of raw emotion, I was just floored by the acting. The whole cast thrust their entire selves into their characterization, making me root for each person. They even made it hard for me to take notes because I could not bear to miss one second.
No character in the show is perfect – they all struggle with that, but it’s the struggle that makes the characters so compelling. And it’s how they reach out to one another or reject one another in their separate struggles that truly makes the show great.
The most impactful moments were when two characters managed to transcend their separations, jump over the platforms to be in the same space or literally fight with their metaphorical demons. When they spoke the truth. When they were furious at one another. When they had the courage and honesty to try to find their parents, to care for a woman they barely knew, to go to Hollywood. And when they were vindictive and told others that they were just crackheads online trying to pretend. This play was so amazing because playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes created wonderful characters on the page that Spectrum’s actors then made into a captivating reality. The cast permitted themselves to be extremes and to also be ordinary, people that anyone could identify with as they struggled to balance the difficulties of their lives.
Water by the Spoonful did the rare and beautiful thing I believe theater is called to do. It brought incredibly difficult topics – PTSD, addiction, death, family problems – into one room, and it made them real and accessible. From Feb. 18-19, in the McCormick Auditorium, this show created something transcendent and courageous from the most human quality there is: honesty.