Review: Theatre22's WATER BY THE SPOONFUL Fails to Quench Thirst

I am a sucker for multimedia storytelling, so when Theatre22's Water by the Spoonful advertised their play to have a jazz structure, I could not wait to see how director Julie Beckman interpreted the rhythm and dissonance of jazz into a narrative arc. Confusingly, Water by the Spoonful's storylines knit together too smoothly, not achieving the dissonance that is promised by the playbill, the score, and the dialogue.

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for drama, Water by the Spoonful is a multifaceted tale of addiction, trauma, and grief. Act One juxtaposes two seemingly incongruous stories, colliding together moments before intermission.

In Water by the Spoonful, cousins Elliot Ortiz (Jany Bacallao) and Yazmin Ortiz (Tesenia Iglesias) struggle individually with their hyperbolic personal demons as they work through the death of Elliot's mother, Ginny. Elliot struggles to find his footing after returning home from the Iraq war, haunted by a PTSD-induced phantasm. Yazmin struggles with the shame of her upbringing, not seeming to fit in with the white family she married into or the Puerto Rican family she grew up with.

Consecutively, you have Odessa Ortiz aka Haikumom (Rose Cano), the administrator of an online chat room offering support for people, like her, struggling to recover for an addiction to crack cocaine. Through Odessa we meet two regular visitors of the chat room-a fiery young woman nicknamed Orangutan (Kieko Green), and a brassy yet humble man nicknamed Chutes and Ladders (G. Valmont Thomas). The nature of the relationship between these three characters has a randomness that is pleasantly unexpected, and full of love.

Compared to the darkly-sweet tale of Haikumom and her chatroom family, Elliot and Yazmin's part of the play felt very serious with a capitol 's', so to speak; like a soap opera starring two characters trying to play alongside and integrate themselves into their counterparts' intimate cyber space. All of the characters were equally complicated individuals, but Orangutan, Chutes and Ladders, and Haikumom's quiet intensity and focused dialogue made them especially sympathetic. Elliot and Yazmin's eratic, emotional outbursts, on the other hand, felt a bit too dramatic.

The set design by Montana Tippett was gorgeous: an industrial, geometric landscape that amplified the disjointed feeling that the play was trying to achieve. Rarely is a steady flow of a traditional narrative arc a criticism, but I was hoping for more dissonance in the feel of the play, as promised. It was not clear to me how jazz played into this story at all, which was the most disappointing thing. All in all, there were definitely some highs: Cano's portrayal of motherly Odessa was haunting and consistent. As the addict-turned-IRS representative Chutes and Ladders, G. Valmont Thomas is a sensation-jolly, sassy, and hilarious. Green makes an excellent impulsive, rebellious young woman that really shines in Act Two. The slice of these characters' performances makes the play worth seeing, but as a whole, this piece is not refined.

I give Theatre22's Water by the Spoonful 2.5/5 stars.

Water by the Spoonful from Theatre22 performs at West of Lenin through November 14, 2015. For information or tickets, visit them online at www.theatre22.org.

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