Water by the Spoonful - Hardcover

"A beautiful, heartbreaking knockout of a play, as startling and innovative and human on the page as on the stage." -Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"This is one of the best new plays I've seen in years. This is a very funny, warm, and yes, uplifting play with characters that are vivid, vital, and who stay with you long after the play is over." -Frank Rizzo, Hartford Courant

"To Hudes' credit and our benefit, the ways in which the people within those worlds bicker, undermine and support each other are as compelling as the inevitable intersections and intrusions between them." -Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Gate

"Hudes corrals harsh voices and brutal stories into a magnificent whole that is beautiful not because it is lovely but because it is brokenheartedly tender and true." -Charles McNulty, LA Times

"Beautifully resounding drama... The playwright examines an array of emotional toils by splashing together droplets of life's bleak realities, harsh revelations, fragile successes and modest triumphs, all of which conspire like tiny specks of contrasting colors on a canvas. A rich, brilliant montage of American urban life that is as dazzling to watch as it is difficult to look away from." -Peter Santilli, Associated Press

"Hudes brilliantly taps into both the family ties that bind as well as the alternative cyber universe... Her dialogue is bright, her characters, compelling... It's only when cyber meets the real world that anger gives way to forgiveness and resistance becomes redemption; the heart of the play opens up and the waters flow freely." -Variety

How many plays make us long for grace? Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Hudes is such a rare play; it is a yearning, funny, deeply sad and deeply lyrical piece, a worthy companion to Hudes’s Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue. The play infects us with the urge to find connection within our families and communities and remains with us long after we’ve left the theater.” Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of How I Learned to Drive

Hudes’s writing is controlled and graceful. Each of the play’s 15 short scenes is perfectly balanced, the language both lyrical and lucid.” Richard Zoglin, Time

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.”
Charles Isherwood, New York Times
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Water by the Spoonful is a rich, brilliant montage of American urban life that is as dazzling to watch as it is difficult to look away from” (Associated Press).

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 forge an unbreakable bond of support and love. 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 and poetic meditation on lives on the brink of redemption and self-discovery during a time of heightened uncertainty, as startling and innovative and human on the page as on the stage” (Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author). Hudes’s cycle of three plays began with Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (Pulitzer Prize finalist) and concludes with The Happiest Song Plays Last.

Quiara Alegría Hudes is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Water by the Spoonful, the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue. Her other works include Barrio Grrrl!, a children’s musical; 26 Miles; Yemaya’s Belly and The Happiest Song Plays Last, the third piece in her acclaimed trilogy. Hudes is on the board of Philadelphia Young Playwrights, which produced her first play in the tenth grade. She now lives in New York with her husband and children.