S73 - Water by the Spoonful; 4m/3w
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
THE STORY: Somewhere in Philadelphia, Elliot has returned from Iraq and is struggling to find his place in the world. Somewhere in a chat room, recovering addicts keep each other alive, hour by hour, day by day. The boundaries of family and community are stretched across continents and cyberspace as birth families splinter and online families collide. WATER BY THE SPOONFUL is a heartfelt meditation on lives on the brink of redemption.
Labels: BIPOC cast, BIPOC Playwright, contemporary, drama
posted by Larisa at 9:42 AM
8 Comments:
This is a really beautiful script dealing with some difficult issues. I like the diversity in the cast, the balance of family drama with the concept of representing online relationships on stage. I feel like it does a lot of things that Tiny Beautiful things does, without pretending to be a comedy. It would be lovely in the round.
I had a hard time following it. The subject matter is intriguing, and I like the diversity. Maybe there was too much going on. I think I need to see a reading or something. Am I just shallow?
Not just you Jean, I had trouble with it too. Maybe with a reading.
The characters are very diverse in terms of race/ethnicity. As we all know, that could be a challenge (but it's a welcomed one). We should embrace this challenge more often than not (our goal is to create an equitable space).
The more significant challenge would be communicating/blocking all that is happening in the play. The audience needs to clearly understand the deference between the "online world" and the "real world". There are also some complicated simultaneous scenes in the play. E.g., scene 12 has simultaneous scenes and one of them involves a door being broken into.
Overall, it’s a decent play. It has strong emotional and thought-provoking elements, and it is told in an engaging way. A few “telling” instead of “showing” moments here or there (but not too bad). This play just needs a strong director who can handle communicating everything clearly.
From Julie: I loved this play. I think we could do really cool stuff with the staging and it would force us to cast diversely. Yes for me.
A POC playwright and diverse cast, yes, but I also was very impressed by the idea and execution of telling many simultaneous stories online and in real life. It covers important themes of mental health, addiction, and recovery. I am a big fan and I'm interested in more works by this playwright.
I liked the idea of the play more than the play itself. The diversity of the playwright and characters and the issues involved seemed appealing. I even liked the idea of performing social media and electronic communication onstage (which can be very easily done). But, alas, I found it incredibly tedious. I finally found a YouTube video of a college production so I could see how it might work in performance. Granted, the production was an amateur college production, but even allowing for inexperienced actors, which I can generally see past when judging a play, I still found the script tedious. Once again, it has a lot of extended speeches that only serve to pause the action without advancing the story sufficiently to hold my interest in the characters. So it's a no for me.
I like the play, but like Vera Stark - not conducive for the Round. We also don't have the space. Door that Don mention, but bathtub, diner booth big enough for 4. Scenes in a bathroom, airport and mountaintop in PR all at the same time? I am all for inventive staging, but this feels movie script more than theater unless you have a large proscenium and utilize projections.
No from me.
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