For Quiara Alegría Hudes, a soldier's story leads to this remarkable feat: 3 plays on 3 L.A. stages
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes learned storytelling among a sprawl of aunts, uncles and cousins. When her mother's talkative Puerto Rican family got together, Hudes not only picked up the art of entertaining an audience with a story, but also accumulated many of the details — and characters — now filling her tales.
She learned so well that at just 29 she had her first brush with a Pulitzer. In 2007, she was a drama prize finalist for "Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue," which was inspired by a Marine cousin serving in Iraq during the first days of fighting there. As that story grew into what would become three plays brimming with other family members, she won the 2012 drama Pulitzer for the second tale, "Water by the Spoonful," in which the cousin reacclimates to civilian life after sustaining a grievous leg injury in the war.
In between, she was a 2009 finalist with Lin-Manuel Miranda for writing the script to his musical "In the Heights," about life in a vibrant Latin American neighborhood in New York. Her writing for the musical also earned a Tony nomination, and the show was named best musical.
These days, Hudes is causing a stir with the musical "Miss You Like Hell," which traverses the United States alongside an undocumented Mexican mother and her U.S.-born teenage daughter. The show exploded onto the scene when its La Jolla Playhouse premiere coincided with President Trump's election.
"Miss You Like Hell" is being readied for an April 10 opening at the Public Theater in New York, where Hudes lives. Here in L.A., her three soldier plays are being produced.
"Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue" opens Saturday at Center Theatre Group's Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City; "Water by the Spoonful" opens Feb. 11 at CTG's Mark Taper Forum in downtown L.A.; and "The Happiest Song Plays Last" opens Feb. 22 in a Latino Theater Company production at the Los Angeles Theatre Center downtown.
While in Los Angeles recently for an extended weekend of rehearsal visits, the 40-year-old playwright thought back to the family gatherings in her hometown, Philadelphia, that proved to be so formative.
"We told stories, watched the Eagles, had dance parties and ate," she recalled. Storytelling was a form of cultural preservation. The family had moved from Puerto Rico when Hudes' mother was a preteen. "Everyone was always telling stories about 'the island.' They would say, 'Sit and listen to this'" because it wasn't in history books and wouldn't otherwise be passed along.
"When there's not a widely recognized, written literature of your culture's history, the oral histories are so urgent and so important."
Not only did she listen, but she would ask to hear stories again, prompting laughs from the adults. But that's how she learned the essentials she would later master at Brown University with playwright Paula Vogel ("How I Learned to Drive") as her mentor.
Writing came naturally, and as a girl she experimented with everything from self-made 'zines to movie scripts. But not until her mid-20s did she realize that writing could be a career. By then she had earned a degree in music, another love.
It was Hudes' mother, a longtime community organizer, who gave her the push.
"My grandmother was getting sick," she recalled, when Mom pointed out: "'We're about to lose a lot of stories. You've always been a writer. Could you do this for real?'"
When one of Hudes' younger cousins returned from Iraq in 2003 with a serious leg injury, she sensed a story coiled there.
Hudes grew up in the bridge years between her first cousins and the first cousins' children. Elliot Ruiz, 6 ½ years younger, was one of the latter.
"He was so much like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air I used to call him Fresh Prince," Hudes said — "extremely charismatic and charming, extremely silly and goofy, huge smile." None of that had changed after Iraq, she added, "but there was a pain there in his eyes that I had not seen, and this is a kid who grew up with some serious trauma. This was different, and I wanted to explore that to find out what that was."
They talked for hours. What emerged in Hudes' writing is fictional but emotionally genuine.
"Elliot" traces a lineage of military service. The voices of two prior generations ring in the air as the title character, inspired by Ruiz, heads to Iraq. Ruiz's adoptive father served in Vietnam, and an older uncle of Hudes' fought in Korea with a Puerto Rican regiment. They were the models for two of the earlier soldiers.
Ruiz, now a 33-year-old office manager and dive master who lives in the San Fernando Valley, had just turned 18 when his Marine battalion entered Iraq at the start of the war. A month later, a car rammed a checkpoint and dragged him along in a snare of concertina wire.
"I don't really talk to other people about my experiences," Ruiz said in a separate interview. But he opened up to Hudes because "that's my big cousin, someone I trust, someone I knew I could say whatever I wanted and she wouldn't judge me."