F (4:30)

Desire to explore a broad range of music.

C (4:35)

So she began taking independent lessons, including studying at the famed BMI Musical Theater workshop. And she began creating theatrical pieces. At least one Sweat of the River, Sweat of the Ocean incorporated the Yoruba music and traditions that she had learned from her mother, a priestess in that African based religion that is practiced throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The feedback from family and friends was encouraging. Still, after college, who d played with a band and booked a few solo gigs, supplementing that income with freelance music jobs as an accompanist for dance classes and singers auditions. But when her mom suggested that she should get serious about her writing, especially about telling stories about the people and problems in their Latino community, Hudis applied to the MFA Plate Writing program at Brown University. There she became a protege of the great playwright and teacher Paula Vogel, who encouraged her to tell her stories and to create her own way of telling them. It didn't take long for Houdes to do that, or to be noticed for doing it. Her plays are infused with a lyricism that demonstrates her clear love of language. But music has remained important to her, and musical forms and structures often influence the way she writes her plays. Her breakthrough, the second play she had professionally produced, was actually named Eliot A Soldier's Fugue, and it uses the overlapping structure of that musical form to tell the stories of three generations of soldiers in a Puerto Rican family and their differing attitudes about serving this country. She based it on conversations she had with the men in her family, including a cousin who had recently served and been wounded in Iraq and who was haunted by his experiences there. The play debuted in early 2006 at the Culture Project, a small theater company in New York that focuses on marginalized voices, and it had a slightly longer run a few months later at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. But despite that relatively low profile, Elliot A Soldier's Fugue was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, the year that David Lindsay Hebert won for Rabbit Hole. I talk about that in another episode. Two years later, Hudes was named a Pulitzer finalist again when she collaborated with Lin Manuel Miranda and wrote the book for his debut musical, in the Heights. And then in 2011, came water by the Spoonful, which debuted at Hartford Stage and hadn't even yet made it to New York before it won the prize. A sequel to Eliot A Soldier's Fugue, Water by the Spoonful details that same character's readjustment to civilian life and his complicated relationship with his mother, her addiction to drugs, and the online recovery community that has become her lifeline. This time, Hudis turned to jazz, particularly the music of John Coltrane, to inform her writing. She used the dissonance and resolution of the music as a metaphor for the recovery process that each participant in the play's online chat room goes through. The competition for the Pulitzer that year was stiff. John Robin Bates Other Desert Cities chronicled the tension between the personal and the political when the daughter of an affluent conservative couple writes a memoir revealing family secrets and Stephen Caram's Songs of the Prophet, a meditation on the meaning of pain and suffering as experienced by two young Lebanese American brothers dealing with the death of their father, the complications of the health care system and their relationship to the philosopher poet Kahlil Gibran. But the five member Pulitzer jury was still most impressed by the way Water by the Spoonful explored how, as they explained it, the boundaries of family and friendship stretched across time and cyberspace. Hudes would go on to write a third Eliot play in what is now known as the Eliot Trilogy. This third play, called the Happiest Song, Plays Last was inspired by the rhythms of Latin music and offers the promise of a happier future for the characters who dis based on her cousin and herself and who this didn't stop there. Her next major play was Daphne's Dive, which focused on the regular su frequent a bar in a gentrifying part of the North Philadelphia neighborhood where she grew up. In 2018, she wrote the book and lyrics for the musical Miss yous Like Hell, about an immigrant mother and her daughter traveling across the country to avoid the mother's deportation. And three years ago, she did a stage adaptation of My Broken Language, a memoir she wrote about the women in her family. Next month, she will publish her first novel, the White Hot, which NPR has already called one of the best books of the year. I am so delighted that Houde's found time in her very busy schedule to talk with me about her past and as you'll hear about her future. Hello, Kiara Aleguia Gudes.

F (11:14)

Welcome to all the drama.

D (11:17)

Thank you.

F (11:18)

I'm going to start off by asking you the same question I ask all of you who have won the Pulitzer, which is, do you remember how you got the news?

D (11:31)

Very much so. It's one of those phone call moments that you do remember. It was nice because I didn't really get the news. Actually, everyone got the news before me. I had my phone turned off for two hours while I was teaching. And before the third hour of that workshop started, we took a little five minute bathroom break and I checked my phone and there were many, many messages. So it's either good news or bad news. And in this case, it was good news. I came back to class after the break and told my students what had happened. I was in quite a daze about it, and they burst into applause. So that was very sweet.

C (12:06)

Absolutely.

F (12:08)

Now, you had been nominated, or I guess the official term is you had been a Pulitzer finalist twice before. So was this something that was in your thought as you worked on this play?

D (12:27)

No. Oh, no, not at all. What's in, what's in your head as you're working on a play, is the play each word and each scene. And you know, those thoughts are far too prominent and loud and noisy to think about things like Pulitzers. And also, it was. It was still early enough in my career. I know I had been a finalist twice, but that stuff just feels lovely and then you move on with your life. It was early enough in my career. I wasn't thinking about that sort of thing. I didn't have the clear sense of when the awards come out. I wasn't like, googling it or something like that. And, and especially with this one. This was a commission for Hartford Stage Company. And, you know, really the Pulitzers have most frequently honored and recognized stuff that was in New York. So I felt off the grid in a way that is good for a sense of artistic freedom and experimentation.

F (13:26)

Now, this play, Water by the Spoonful, is the middle part of a trilogy. And I wondered, had you originally planned to write more about your protagonist, Eliot who you introduced in Eliot's Fugue.

D (13:45)

Originally, the first play was, as you mentioned, Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue. And that was a standalone play. Originally, it was based off of interviews with my cousin and my uncle, who had both served in the United States military. So I wanted to explore a Puerto Rican family and the history of Puerto Ricans serving in the United States military. My cousin was one of the first troops, actually in the first troops to cross the border north into Iraq during the war in Iraq. When he enlisted that it was before that war. So he thought, oh, I'm going to go get this good summer job and make some money now that I'm about to graduate high school. And then, whoops, it becomes a war. Within six months, he's deployed. So it all happened quite fast. And within a handful of months of his deployment, he was severely injured, requiring medevac, multiple surgeries. Those injuries linger today in very significant ways in his life. Anyway, fast forward. I interview him. I interview his dad, who had been a Marine in Vietnam. It's my first production in New York. We do the play with page 73, shout out page 73. It was a phenomenal experience with them. And what happened was that play ran about an hour and seven minutes, an hour and 10 minutes. It was quite short. And what we decided to do, the war in Iraq was still happening, and we could feel that the audience needed to discuss, they needed more time after this short play. So very quickly we connected with an organization called Veterans for Peace. And they came and basically act two was they hosted a Talk Back with a different veteran every night, and whatever audience members wanted to stay would stay. And what I observed was there were a lot of parents whose young adult children were deployed at the time, and they needed to process. They were scared. Their kids had already been injured. This was something that was an unfolding situation. And that started to give me a sense, especially when they started to talk about, oh, my kids just got home, but they're going to be redeployed, that sort of thing. That started making me feel like, this story is not over, this war is not over, what's going to happen next? So that's when I got a sense that there was probably a continuation that could be meaningful.

F (16:05)

But your play also deals with drug addiction. When did you decide to sort of meld the two?

D (16:16)

It's hard to pinpoint. You know, so many thoughts come through your head in a day, and it feels organic and it's hard to isolate moments. But I do remember that for a long time, I Had wanted to write about addiction in the community where I grew up. I was writing these stories out of North Philadelphia, the Puerto Rican community. And there were different topics I wanted to explore our history of protest, our musical traditions. Addiction was one I had grown up with, and that had affected my family directly and had affected the community infrastructurally. But I was very reticent because at the time I was writing, there still were not a lot of Latino plays being done. And the notion of creating another, quote unquote addict role for a Latino actor was not one I wanted to support. So around the time that I was thinking about these young men and women being deployed, a lot of the stories in the news were about their addictions to painkillers as part of their ongoing trauma recovery from their active service. And suddenly I got this notion. I thought, oh my gosh, we're going to have another generation of addicts, but in a different way from this war in Iraq and this notion of recovery. I thought, ah, there we go. That's a role I could write without stepping into that kind of ethical minefield of creating a quote unquote, Latino junkie role.

F (17:47)

The characters who are in this group, sort of self help group in your play seem intentionally diverse racially in their relationship to their drug usage economically. And so I'm wondering how intentional that was. And also if you did any kind of research to drug recovery.

D (18:16)

So when the notion of recovery hit me, I was. I was very excited. And yeah, I dove right into the research. So the first thing that I discovered was a lot of recovery is centered around community. And there were different communities. And sometimes with their permission, sometimes kind of anonymously, I would join these communities. So a big one was online. There were these chat rooms, kind of like all that chat for theater or Broadway world, for theater, recovering addicts. And so I started reading a lot of those and those I would just kind of lurk. And I also would go to NA meetings, AA meetings, and to those I would introduce myself and ask permission to explain what I was doing there. And ask permission, and I always got permission. But the online ones were particularly interesting to me for a few reasons. One was the humor, which was also in AA and NA meetings in person. But the humor was just alive. The wordplay, the language. I was like, this is a playwright's dream. Because the self deprecating humor, it was wonderful. The linguistic interest was top notch. And also just the sense that the chat rooms were really diverse. People from all over the country, people from different generations. I mean, you had 15 year olds and 65 year olds going, please help me make it through the night. Help me not use, Help me not use. And then here you would have like a soccer mom in a flyover state saying, okay, I'll stay up with you tonight. Let's chat. What music do you like? That sort of thing. And so the notion of the Internet as a place that would allow for community, that wasn't really possible in person, was very exciting to me.

F (19:58)

When you talk about the humor online, I was also thinking that your plays, this play in particular, but your plays in general deal with some very serious, very heavy subjects. And I was curious about how you balance the whole thing of writing about racial pain and leavening it with racial joy.

D (20:30)

My sincere hope is that the joy the party is in the work. Also, that trilogy ended with the play called the Happiest Song Plays Last. And that one's kind of explicitly about partying, even as it's about trauma and recovery. But I think that sense of party infiltrated the previous two plays. Also, when I was with page 73 working on Elliot A Soldier's Fugue off Broadway, our sound designer came up with this playlist. I sent him all my musical inspirations. He came up with a playlist that really captured this sense of, okay, we're sitting in this woman's backyard and she's talking about the joy of gardening, she's talking about planting. And then you also hear a song that would be, it's like the party happens in the backyard. The party happens in the togetherness. Same with Water by the Spoonful. The party happens in the chat room too. It's not just a place to go talk about agony. It's a place to go have fellowship and have fun. And I think a formative experience for me that really informed my worldview was the summer of 1991. Juan Luis Guerra's album Bachata Rosa comes out. It's this mega hit bachata and merengue album. So danceable, so joyous. And just the memory of us dancing to that album. It was a cassette tape at that time. All summer long. I can just put myself right in that living room. And then also the memory. And I have got the funeral cards to prove it. Like, that is the year when there was so much loss and death in my family, especially of young generations, hiv, addiction, and the notion that we could dance when we had the most profound amount of grief. That's it. That to me is the kind of honest recipe of my life, of my worldview, that those things inform each Other. And that joy is really earned more meaningful when it's a refutation of despair.

F (22:39)

It's interesting to me that you reference music because it seems as though music has been such an important part of your life, such an important part of your work. And Water is heavily influenced by jazz, the music of John Coltrane in particular. And I wondered why you chose jazz for this play and why Coltrane.

D (23:07)

So the whole trilogy, each play takes a different kind of music and uses that as a cue to how to structure it. The first play was Bach Preludes and Fugues. And I just, amongst other things, loved the notion of writing a very silly Rican. Puerto Rican diaspora play that includes Bach Preludes and Fugues just to confuse people and not allow any boxes to happen on that one. So that's me being a little. A little sneaky, but it's true. It's what. It's music I grew up playing and loving. The second play, Water by the Spoonful. Yes, there we're looking at Coltrane. Two reasons that Coltrane really was attracting me, and in particular his album Love Supreme. One is it feels almost like ecclesiastic music. It's. It's sacred. He writes about that in his liner notes. This is music in response to God and my conversations with God. And you can feel that in. In the music. And I was thinking about matters of faith for that play. You know, when do you lose the faith? When you hold tight to the faith. You know, my God, why have you forsaken me? These. These kind of fundamental spiritual questions that this young man is facing as he's grieving. And the other one is that the particular blend in A Love supreme. And there's monologues about this in the play of discord to consonance, of dissonance to resolution, was very attractive to me and gave me clues on how to write the structure of the play. So basically, all that means is, you know, I'm trained as a musician, so I actually think about dramatic structure in terms of musical terms. You have discord, which is notes that don't go together. To me, I translate that directly into characters. You know, Faulkner said, drama is the heart in conflict with itself. That's inner dissonance. And we all have that. And we have these different factions that either organically don't go together or we're told don't go together. And sometimes they find resolution. Sometimes there's a chord that's harmonic that comes out of that discord. And so kind of finding the pathways in and out of dissonance to Resolution was just great artistic and intellectual game for me as I was writing that play and worked.

F (25:38)

Obviously, I've read your very lovely memoir, and so I know how important family is to you. And when we began this conversation, you talked about how the trilogy actually began with conversations with your cousin and your uncle. So I'm wondering what has been the response from. From your family to these plays?

D (26:07)

Had some experiences I'll never forget of. Of closeness. And what I found is that gaining trust is a process that never ends. Kind of like growing, you know, to use one example, in Water by the Spoonful, I interviewed my cousin who was in recovery for many years, and she was very straightforward about her experiences. And then I invited her up to the opening night at Hartford Stage Company a few years later when the play was ready. And I don't think she'd ever traveled to Connecticut. She came up and she cried during the play, the morning after. And the play is fictional, but it's very much inspired from her character. And the morning after the play, we're sitting in the hotel. We're having hotel breakfast, and she opened up on a whole other level. She told me things that she hadn't told me originally about how much she really, really does still struggle with wanting to use. And that beautiful conversation would not have happened without the play, you know, so it's interesting how it's a kind of perpetually unfolding book of. Of storytelling with ourselves, with each other. It has informed my world view in that I really do think, in my experience, when I asked my cousin and my uncle about their service in the Marines, their responses and experiences couldn't have been more different. My uncle had 30 years of hindsight. My cousin had, like a month of hindsight. That creates a profoundly different sort of response to similar questions. But what I did find is that just simply asking someone, hey, will you tell me your story about this in a way that there's time that they know you mean it and you actually want to hear, you want to listen. People want to tell their stories. I really think this. People want to tell their stories, and they're just oftentimes looking for an appropriate moment because they're worried, you know, it's not appropriate. It's too intense, et cetera, et cetera. They're going to bore someone. And so, you know, I'm a big proponent of just ask, ask a little formally, you know, hey, can we find time to talk about this particular thing? I care about this. I want to. I want to listen. So the experience with the family has been Good. And I've made mistakes, too, thinking, oh, this is something that we all have the same point of view on and been proven wrong about that too. And so there are some regrets there. But I think in general, it's been an amazing process going back to the Pulitzer.

F (28:47)

Did winning have any effect on your work, your relationship to your work? I ask because some people who have won the prize, it paralyzed them. Obviously, that didn't happen to you. You have a whole bunch of work after winning the prize. Some people have just put it out of mind, but some people have felt it as a pressure, something they have to live up to. And so what has been your experience?

D (29:22)

It, for me, was not paralyzing. The Pulitzer was very exciting to receive that. And in one way, it felt liberating, because it's like, oh, okay, I was still fairly young. I was like, I guess I don't have anything to prove now. And that's. That's liberating. And by another token, like, it was never a huge financial success. Like, it never went to Broadway. We did have one offer to transfer it to Broadway, but I was honestly nervous about that. I thought, I don't know, that people want to pay $200 to see this play. I just didn't want to set up the play to fail. So we didn't do the Broadway route. It never became a zeitgeisty cultural phenomenon, so it wasn't that much pressure. It's not like I had a bunch of, you know, fans waiting for, like, what's her next move gonna be? It still felt, like, pretty chill. You know, you just get up and you. You keep writing. The next day after. After winning the Pulitzer, I wrote some more pieces I was really, really proud of. After winning the Pulitzer, I wrote some more pieces. I was like, well, okay, guess I didn't totally get there on that one. You know, it's just kind of. Life continues.

C (30:34)

Now, your latest project is a novel.

F (30:37)

That'S coming out this fall. Why the decision to tell a story in that form?

D (30:45)

Okay, so here's me being like, my uncle and my cousin, right? All the play stuff. Feels like I've got a lot of hindsight. And here I am right now in this. In the passionate throes of loving this new novel I've written and very excited to share it with the world soon. I feel in a whole new stage of my life. I feel. I feel like a new woman. I really do. And I'm excited to tell you this. Like, it's exciting to feel this feeling. I'm 45, 7 years old. I'm about to turn 48, and things are changing. Things are changing. The tectonic plates are shifting. This conversation really brings us to this place, because I moved to New York in 2004. So here we are 20 years later. During that time, I wrote pieces out of my community, out of my family, and out of my personal life. And they were fictional mostly, but they were inspired by real people. They were. And these people could recognize themselves in these characters. I love, for the most part, the body of work I created, and I'm proud of it, and I do feel it served a purpose. Part of that purpose, though, is what I'm kind of moving on from a little bit, and I think it's this sense of. This sense of things being a little unfair. Growing up, I saw how Philadelphia is the fourth most segregated city in the nation, and the Latino community in it. The infrastructure was not to the level of the rest of other neighborhoods in the city. I mean, it was really ignored and scorned as a community. And it upset me so much to see this growing up. And there was an instinct to write coming out of that being like, no, we are the American story. We matter. We have incredible values that the larger culture could benefit from studying and learning. You know, so just this impulse to share, to tell, to advocate. And so there is a little bit of an ethical impulse there. And part of that is meeting the community's buy in a little bit. You know, if the community rejected that work, it would be like, well, okay, that was kind of a failed goal. But by and large, I do think that the work had some meaning for those people in the community who, you know, participate in the arts. And I'm just in a different place. I feel like I did it. I did it. I did my goal. The memoir, to me, was the culmination of that. What more is there to tell? I actually just told my life story, and now I'm just like, you know what? I'm a woman now. Like, I'm not looking for permission. I'm making it up. It's coming from my mind. It's coming from my heart. It's not. It's not trying to serve a greater social purpose. It's not for someone else. It's for my own curiosity. It's for my own inner sense of rebellion and my own inner sense of wonder. And it feels like all new terrain. And so that's why the form of the novel, it's so interior, and it's all made up. There's nothing autobiographical in my novel. And yet in some ways, it feels like the truest to me thing I've ever written because it is all mine. It's all from my imagination. And so I love that. It feels like the start of something new.

F (34:04)

It sounds exciting. It sounds exciting. But can you express those feelings, use your imagination that way in the theatrical form as well? Or have we lost you, those of us who love theater?

D (34:23)

No, no, no, no. I should clarify. I'm not closing the door on that kind of project. I'm working on a play right now that is about a man I got to know in New Haven who was a dining hall worker at Yale and who smashed a racist stained glass window panel. You know, so this project, writing out of community stories, writing out of my life, continues. But this new thing is happening, and, you know, I'm ready to cause some trouble. Like, I just want to, like, muck it up. And it just makes me think of these times that I've auditioned a lot of young female roles for my plays. Miss yous Like Hell in the Heights. And I see this thing with young female actors where all of the musculature is trained to be non threatening, like the upward vocal inflection at the end of a sentence, the kind of doughy eyed, like, almost a sense of apology and permission seeking to be in the room. And I've seen this hundreds of times, you know, so this is not a critique of a particular actor. This is a trend I have seen, and I recognize myself in that. I don't want to be that anymore. I'm not looking for permission. I'm not. I'm not even trying to make myself comfortable, you know, and it's. That's the project now. And it. And. And hopefully it can coexist with the. The playwriting project too. I think it can.

C (35:49)

Well, this is exciting.

F (35:51)

It makes me really look forward to the next thing that we see of yours on the stage as well as on the page. In the meantime, I want to thank you for taking the time to look back with us and talk about Water by the spoonful.

D (36:10)

Oh, thank you. And I have to say, I don't know if this will make it onto the show, but it was pretty wild how we met because we were on the Pulitzer jury together during COVID So they were remote meetings, and some of them were pandemic plays. And it's just a very memorable time when no theater was happening. It felt like. And yet I was in these rich conversations with these theatrical colleagues who I had not yet met. And it was it was nice. It was a lively moment in a tough time.

F (36:42)

It was, it was, it was sort of a little oasis within that time.

C (36:49)

Again, thank you.

F (36:51)

And also, good luck with, with the book.

D (36:55)

Thank you, Jan. It's called the White Hot. It comes out November 11th. Great. Take care.

C (37:02)

And thank you for listening.

F (37:04)

I hope you'll come back next time.

C (37:07)

And if you have any comments, questions.

F (37:10)

Or suggestions, please send them to me@janreadwayradio.com.

G (37:20)

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