Quiara Alegría Hudes – who nabbed the Pulitzer Prize for Water by the Spoonful and penned the In the Heights stage and movie versions – has turned her 2021 My Broken Language memoir into an irresistible stage piece. Indeed, why anyone would even attempt to resist this exuberant production, which Hudes exhilaratingly directs, is cause for serious head-examining.
For 90 minutes, Daphne Ruben-Vega, Zabryna Guevara, Samora la Perdida, Marilyn Torres, and Yani Marin release themselves into something that start to finish suggests a circa 1988-2004 funhouse ride through Hudes’ Philly-Rican girlhood neighborhood. She recalls and reflects on the largely segregated barrio of joy, despair, abundance, and deprivation that molded her.
She piles memory upon memory upon memory of her matriarchal upbringing from childhood to her years as a Brown undergraduate studying playwrighting (obviously with impressive subsequent success). All the while, pianist Ariacne Trujillo-Durand helps animate proceedings with Chopin and music supervisor Alex Lacamoire’s interludes. In tandem, choreographer Ebony Williams keeps group and solo movements evolving from gleeful abandon to spiritually tormented.
Hudes introduces any number of women ages 13 to unspecified abuela (grandmother) years, many of them cousins with names like Cuca, Nuchi, Tico, and Flor, and all arriving from wherever to populate the North and West Philadelphia landscape.
Her theme – as the title hints – is the broken language(s) she and her young and old family members find themselves required to speak within an evolving culture plunked unceremoniously down after migrating from Puerto Rico to clash with larger, more settled cultures.
Frequently, she pinpoints the disparity the characters face but perhaps no more jarringly when one of them wonders why, after seeing a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesmen, it’s considered a tragedy. What’s tragic, she wants to know, about a man who has a happy family (a wife, two healthy sons) and a job?
During the sequence, Hudes flashes a bit of brilliance. She reaps laughs while simultaneously poking a sizable hole in the infrequently questioned discrepancies between societies on how some of the most basic human issues are differently judged.
A similar query is lodged when “Author” (read Hudes) visits the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Appreciating the fine works throughout the galleries, she ruminates on how to relate someone like Marcel Duchamp to her origins. Where, she wonders unsurprisingly, is art that reflects her immediate world?
Sporadically breaking into choreographer Williams’ frequent playful dances, the cast members enact a childhood escapade to New Jersey’s Six Flags Great Adventure as well as indulge in kitchen activities, weddings, and other light(er)hearted activities. The importance of books is established, not least when they’re arranged in a circle on Arnulfo Maldonado’s primarily robin’s-egg-blue set with its tubs, plants and upstage steps. Hudes terms books her “inner feast.”
More than once, the playwright brings up the often relatively young ages at which family members died—or, in the instance of her spunky abuela, haven’t yet. The information jibes uncomfortably with today’s statistics.
While the various and colorfully varied episodes mount and the five actors flaunt their versatility, Hudes saves her most captivating observation for last. Throughout the script, Author dominates, and in the last several minutes, she describes the bodies of women she has known.
Portraying Author, Guevara makes an actor’s magnet of it, going on about legs that look like “thick firm tree trunks,” bellies like “a shelf where you could prop your cafecito,” a C-section scar “thick as a thumb.” Although the word “awe” has degenerated into a tired cliché, Hudes’ accomplishment is an awe-inspiring monologue for the ages – as is Guevara’s explosive performance of it.
Ultimately, the triumph Hudes achieves in My Broken Language is two-fold. She makes it utterly clear that her primary goal is to let Puerto Rican women know she has seen them, is one of them, and is planting their more-often-than-not untold stories front and center for them to watch themselves as appreciated for who and what they are.
She also brings the stories to a larger audience who may have only the vaguest recognition of these women – other then, maybe, their presence in occasional properties like West Side Story (created by white men). Which prompts mention that My Broken Language is the second in a trilogy – Daphne’s Dive is the first – with the third, presumably, on the way. And not soon enough.
Hudes is establishing herself as one of the foremost playwrights increasingly breaking barriers – and diverse barrios – now that BIPOC Lives Matter is a thriving literary movement. More power to her.
My Broken Language opened November 6, 2022, at Signature Center and runs through November 27. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
