28 pages • 56 minutes read
Quiara Alegría HudesWater By The Spoonful
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Act Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
The Ghost
The Ghost is a physical manifestation of Elliot’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from fighting in Iraq. The audience never learns who the Ghost represents or why the Ghost keeps asking for his passport back. The Ghost symbolizes the pain and trauma that haunts Elliot. Much like the Ghost, Elliot cannot avoid the source of his pain. Each character has some type of ghost, or pain from the past, haunting them. How they deal with their ghosts and move forward is at the forefront of the play’s conclusion.
The Chat Room
The chat room is a virtual space that offers genuine connection and intimacy. When characters enter the chat room, they are vulnerable and brutally honest with each other. They have a common struggle—the shared trauma of addiction—and they find the chat room a safe, supportive space in which to seek healing. Fountainhead initially disrupts the balance of the chat room, but it ultimately provides him a space to be honest with himself about his struggle with addiction. Other characters who do not struggle with addiction enter the chat room and struggle with the dissonance between the online world and the real world they know. At the end of the play, through Yaz taking over site administration while Odessa goes to rehab, the safe space of the chat room is allowed to persevere.
Water Wings
Haikumom sends Chutes&Ladders a pair of water wings after he shares a story of almost drowning. The water wings symbolize a support system, as they are a tool literally designed to keep people who wear them from drowning in deep water. In the play, each character needs their own water wings to feel supported as they take brave steps to move forward into the unknown (the deep water). Chutes&Ladders receives the water wings just before he finds the courage to sell his car and buy a plane ticket to Japan. In turn, Chutes&Ladders’ arrival in Japan gives Orangutan the support she needs to face her future. The chat room is a necessary support for half of the cast. Elliot and Yaz’s close relationship helps support each of them through the trauma of Mami Ginny’s death and their brave next steps.
Jazz
The stage directions dictate that the jazz to be played during the play is music by John Coltrane – “The sublime stuff (A Love Supreme). And the noise (Ascension)” (5). They are both played in Scene Three, while Yaz lectures her students about the role of dissonance in music: “The ugliness bore no promise of a happy ending. The ugliness became an end in itself” (18). This seems to symbolize that the ugliness of trauma in each character’s life will effectively congeal, and the notes will become an end in themselves.Yaz continues to contextualize for her students and explain that dissonance means giving all of the notes equal meaning, thereby freeing them. It’s not that the trauma and pain carry more weight in the characters’ lives, but they do carry equal weight to the moments of joy and healing. The characters are free to move back and forth between trauma and healing. From a distance, this can sound like chaotic and ugly noise, but really it is beautiful and liberating music.
