And yet for a drama peopled by characters who have traveled a long way in the dark, "Water by the Spoonful" gives off a shimmering, sustaining warmth. Ms. Hudes writes with such empathy and vibrant humor about people helping one another to face down their demons that regeneration and renewal always seem to be just around the corner.
The most prominent strand in the play's multilayered plot concerns the continuing struggles of Elliot Ortiz (Armando Riesco), a former Marine who was wounded during a brief tour in Iraq. An aspiring actor who is scraping together a living working at a Subway sandwich shop, Elliot walks with a limp, even after multiple surgeries, and is plagued by nightmares about a traumatic encounter with a civilian in Iraq.
He lives in Philadelphia with the aunt who raised him. Now Elliot has become her caretaker as her death approaches. Elliot's older cousin Yaz (Zabryna Guevara) mostly offers emotional support. Although she is the kid from their extended Puerto Rican family who made good, teaching music at Swarthmore, the stress of an impending divorce has distracted her from offering the help Elliot could sorely use. Only when Elliot's aunt finally succumbs does Yaz find herself drawn back into the turbulent family drama, as arrangements for the funeral must be made.
Scenes depicting Elliot and Yaz trying to keep their lives on a steady course in the shadow of loss alternate with dispatches from cyberspace, exchanges among four people on a chat forum for recovering crack addicts. The administrator — her online handle is Haikumom (Liza Colón-Zayas) — tries to keep the peace in this sometimes fractious group, as when a newbie, John (Bill Heck), enters the conversation with a long post about how his Saturday-only addiction is interfering with his otherwise glittering life: a lovely wife and son, and a big bank account, thanks to the sale of a company he started.
His complacency about his problem riles two chat room participants: Clayton (Frankie Faison), a middle-aged I.R.S. worker in San Diego, and a young woman, Madeleine (Sue Jean Kim), who's just returned from the digital void to announce that she's three months sober and has moved to Japan, where she was born before being adopted by an American family, to kick-start her life.
The two strands of the plot are connected when it is revealed that Haikumom is Odessa, a long-estranged member of the Ortiz family. She learns of the death of her relative — a beloved figure in the local Puerto Rican neighborhood — when she reads of it in the paper.
"Water by the Spoonful" is the second in a trilogy of plays by Ms. Hudes centering on the Ortiz family. (The first, "Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue," was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and the final installment, "The Happiest Song Plays Last," is to be produced at the Goodman Theater this spring.)
Although this play's focus is comparatively broad — the half-dozen primary characters are all given fully developed, overlapping story lines — Ms. Hudes writes with precision and economy, so that the play doesn't feel unwieldy or overstuffed. (What does feel oppressive, unfortunately, is Neil Patel's unattractive set.)
The dovetailing of some of the stories does occasionally seem too pat: the growing friendship between Madeleine and Clayton, resulting in his impulsive trip to Japan, I found a little romanticized. But they all illuminate the play's dominant theme, the myriad ways in which human lives can intersect, and the potentially great rewards — or irreparable damage — that can result from the unlikely spark of those connections.
For Elliot, the mother-child bond was brutally sundered when he was just a boy, and yet the wound remains raw. And Odessa's impulsive desire to connect with John — she defends him when he comes in for verbal strafing on the Web forum — brings them into surprising intimacy, arrestingly depicted in the play's tender final image.
Under the direction of Davis McCallum, who also staged the premiere production in 2011 at Hartford Stage, the play's fine performers breathe richly felt life into their roles. Mr. Riesco's movingly drawn Elliot has the life-toughened exterior of a young man who is keeping his anxieties under tight but tenuous control. (Mr. Riesco portrayed the same character in the 2006 New York premiere of "Soldier's Fugue.")
As Yaz, Ms. Guevara exudes a brisk competence that occasionally falters to reveal the harassed insecurity of a woman who has had to fight to grasp every opportunity life has tossed her way.
The static quality of the scenes that are "set" online is mostly erased by animated performances from Mr. Heck ("Angels in America," "The Orphans' Home Cycle"), as the upper-middle-class striver in secret thrall to an unlikely (for him) drug; Ms. Kim as the exuberant Madeleine, whose comfort in her online connections has given way to a yearning need for a more tangible relationship; and Mr. Faison's avuncular Clayton, who has all but resigned himself to a life of solitude after his grown son's rejection. (Still, there are moments when the character's off-line activities make it unlikely that they would also be tapping away online simultaneously.)
In a brief scene depicting one of Yaz's lectures, she tries to impress on her students the beauty of John Coltrane's music. Playing a snippet from his 1964 composition "A Love Supreme," she speaks of how he uses dissonance as "a gateway to resolution." A year later, she says, his ideas had evolved, so that "the ugliness bore no promise of a happy ending."
"Water by the Spoonful" could be said to occupy the territory somewhere between those two strategies. Resolution remains tentative for most of the characters, and while the promise of a happy ending is in sight for at least some of them, all have learned from hard experience that people break promises as often as they keep them.
Water by the Spoonful
By Quiara Alegría Hudes; directed by Davis McCallum; sets by Neil Patel; costumes by Esosa; lighting by Russell H. Champa; sound by Joshua Schmidt; projections by Aaron Rhyne; fight director, Thomas Schall; production stage manager, Roy Harris; stage manager, Trisha Henson; associate artistic director, Christopher Burney; production manager, Jeff Wild; general manager, Dean A. Carpenter. Presented by Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, artistic director; Casey Reitz, executive director. At the Second Stage Theater, 305 West 43rd Street, Clinton; (212) 246-4422, 2st.com. Through Jan. 27. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
WITH: Liza Colón-Zayas (Odessa), Frankie Faison (Clayton, or Chutes and Ladders), Zabryna Guevara (Yaz), Bill Heck (John, or Fountainhead), Sue Jean Kim (Madeleine, or Orangutan), Armando Riesco (Elliot) and Ryan Shams (Policeman/Professor Aman/Ghost).
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