Economic Inequity in "Water by the Spoonful"

Daniel José Molina

There's a fine line between creating socially conscious theater and creating theater that exploits the poor. Playwrights writing about a community that's not their own are more likely to cross that line. Quiara Alegría Hudes, in Water by the Spoonful, dodges that bullet. What's less clear is what exactly her play, rooted in economically blighted North Philadelphia, contributes towards a solution to her community's problems.

Hudes starts writing her plays about North Philly by interviewing her relatives who still live there (she lives in Brooklyn). She adds a layer of fiction to protect the innocent, and then writes award winning plays that are being staged in some of the nation's best theaters, like the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. While allowing the disenfranchised denizens of a community where the most viable economy is drug trafficking to tell their stories is empowering, it's not clear that Hudes' "Elliot Cycle" contributes much else to her community.

The first act of Water by the Spoonful is two seemingly divergent stories: one of a veteran affected by PTSD who has just lost his adoptive mother, the other of a chatroom for people struggling with crack addiction. The set, designed at OSF by Sibyl Wickersheimer, is two columns of blue square platforms. The chatroom participants use these as their individual worlds, but the vet Elliot (Daniel José Molina) and his cousin Yasmin Ortiz (Nancy Rodriguez) are freer in their transgressions of the blue boundaries. Towards the end of the first act we discover their connective tissue - both stories are principally located in North Philly, and Odessa Ortiz, a.k.a. Haikumom (Vilma Silva), is both the founder of the chatroom and the birth mother of Elliot. The second act brings the characters face to face with their demons, whether they be Elliot's PTSD or Odessa's guilt over the death of her daughter, and the addictions that their demons bring with them.

While there is a token rich white man in the chatroom (John a.k.a. Fountainhead, played by Barret O'Brien), this is really about poverty in North Philly. Elliot is a soldier, and we know that our military is built on the backs of economically disadvantaged young people. For those who stay in North Philly, the primary means of employment is selling drugs to local addicts and recreational users from other neighborhoods. These problems are rooted in a complex history of race-based socio-economics, including limited opportunities for Blacks and Latinos, and white flight. One play played primarily for middle to upper class whites in Oregon, however, is unlikely to promote equity and better quality of life for denizens of disadvantaged communities. Granted, Hudes' documentary process of writing plays that allows voices from an isolated and blighted community to be heard from New York to Oregon is empowering, but that empowerment does not necessarily create employment opportunities for North Philadelphians outside of the drug industry.

There are two good ways to avoid exploitation in creating theater about disadvantaged communities: the first is to have significant ties to the communities you're creating theater about, and the second is to use your theater to work towards solutions for your community's significant issues. Hudes has deep familial roots in North Philly, so it's not like she's telling stories about somebody else's economically devastated community for financial gain. However, it's unlikely that a play in Ashland can have a direct positive impact on the economy of North Philadelphia.

Cymbeline

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for as long as I can remember, has had hits and misses just like any other theater. Sometimes they even happen in the same show, and sometimes they’re distinct enough that they can be attributed to specific jobs within the production. Cymbeline is just such a show. 

Image from the Eureka Times-Standard

OSF has always attracted the cream of the crop in terms of actors. This cast is mostly superb, with stand-out performances by Dawn-Lyen Gardner as (the play’s real lead) Imogen, Daniel José Molina as the impetuously fatalistic Posthumus, Kenajuan Bentley as the ever-suave creep Iachimo, and Donovan Mitchell as the adorable little brother Arviragus aka Cadwal. These four actors ground Shakespeare’s ridiculously involved soap-opera of a plot with honest and often playful interactions with the convoluted world in which they find themselves.

Cymbeline loses its grounding in its direction. Director Bill Rauch and costume designer David C. Woolard chose to add “a few mythical creatures to populate a landscape in which miraculous surprise lies beyond every bend in the story” (from Rauch’s program note). The goat-men and pig-men and people with pointy ears confused an already confusing story. That’s not to say it was a bad choice – in fact, I feel it was a good choice used sloppily. Kate McConnell writes in OSF’s Illuminations: A Guide to the 2013 Plays about Shakespeare’s “green worlds”:

“This ‘green world’ (a term coined by literary critic Northrop Frye), separated from the rules and organization of urbanity, gives the characters space to transform (sometimes literally), fall in and out of love, and discover who they truly are. In Cymbeline, the wilds of Wales perform this function….For the characters who travel to this place, transformation and revelation await.”

Rauch could have used his mythological creatures to emphasize Wales as a place of transformation and lent clarity to the story. Instead, this choice read as superfluous at best, and at worst, confusing.

Rauch’s casting Howie Seago as the titular king was also ill-advised. Seago is deaf and communicates via ASL. The way this plays on stage is that he delivers his lines in ASL and another actor interprets for those of us not schooled enough to understand sign-language. The effect is that Cymbeline’s tempestuousity is scattered across the stage, diluting its power and weakening the impact of the play’s main power-broker. Not that Seago is a bad actor – in fact, from what I can see, he is very accomplished in his craft. It’s just that, unfortunately, his lack of hearing is very much a handicap when it comes to acting Shakespeare.

Cymbeline is a play in which Shakespeare revels in his accomplishments as a storyteller by creating a labyrinthine plot that ranges from the improbable to the confusing. With such a play, it’s the artistic team’s job to clarify and ground the plot. OSF’s actors for the most part are successful in this. Unfortunately, they receive no help from their director, whose choices add further layers to an already excessively layered play.