Quiara Alegría Hudes in Five Plays

A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Musical for her theatrical work, as well as a shortlist recipient for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, Quiara Alegría Hudes is a brilliant and lyrical writer whose award-winning work spans brings stories to the stage, page, voice and screen.

Originally trained as a composer and pianist, Hudes infuses music into her writing process and also into her shows, whether through characters like Water by the Spoonful’s adjunct music professor who loves John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” poetic turns and rhythms in her dialogue, or through collaboration on musicals like the Tony Award-winning In the Heights. A daughter of the Puerto Rican diaspora, Quiara was born and raised in West Philly and now lives in New York, and much of her work brings both places she calls home to theatrical life with authenticity and humor. In each and every endeavor, her writing is heartful, lyrical, character-rich and unafraid of the raw edges of authenticity, whether bittersweet or stinging.

Explore Hudes’ celebrated plays (and one musical!) below, each of which brings her characters to life with breathtaking storytelling and a deep understanding of human relationships.

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Yemaya’s Belly (US)

Yemaya’s Belly marked the beginning of a wonderful theatrical journey for Hudes, as it was her very first play!

The energetic yet whimsical drama follows a Cuban boy from a humble farming family whose first taste of a cold Coca-Cola causes him to dream of a world beyond his family’s meager acre, where he might meet the “President of America.” His epic journey into manhood and materialism, from farm to city to a raft sailing to the New World, introduces a quality that will continue to crop up in Hudes’ work time and time again: A beautifully poetic way of accentuating universal truths through the specificity of a character’s story, especially the stories of immigrants.

After making its rounds in the new play development world, an early version of the show premiered in Washington D.C. with Miracle Theatre in February 2004, directed by Sacha Reich. After some rewrites, it made its full world premiere in Portland, Maine with Portland Stage Company on March 1, 2005. Directed by Peter Sampieri, the production starred Stephanie Beatriz (who would later go on to star in the feature film adaptation of Hudes’ musical collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda, In the Heights) as well as Alexis Camins, Gilbert Cruz, Joaquin Torres and Brigitte Viellieu-Davis.

Despite being her first theatrical endeavor, Yemaya’s Belly received multiple awards, including the 2003 Clauder Competition for New England Playwriting, the Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting, and the Kennedy Center/ACTF Latina Playwriting Award. These early wins foreshadow the future acclaim her later works would receive, including Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, but all ultimately affirm her writing’s reputation as both universal and specific, ordinary and outstanding, and above all, noteworthy.

The Elliot Trilogy

One of Hudes’ gifts to the theatrical world is the way she brings the stories of Puerto Rican Americans to the stage. Her trilogy of plays known as The Elliot Trilogy does just that across a cycle of three separate plays. Notably, Second Stage Theatre – the theatre that first premiered the second play, Water by the Spoonful – later performed the entire Elliot Trilogy, allowing audiences to see Elliot’s journey unfold in full.

Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue (US)

The first of these plays, the deeply poetic, touching and often funny Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue, first introduces us to Elliot Ortiz, the character who is the namesake of the series and the through-line of all three plays. A finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the play traces the legacy of war on three generations of a Puerto Rican family through the lens of 19-year-old Elliot. Recently anointed as the hometown hero, Elliot returns from Iraq on leave with a leg injury, in which time he learns the stories of his father and grandfather who served in Korea and Vietnam before him in. The question he’s left with is a difficult one: Will he go back to war a second time? Described by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a “lush and evocative tone poem about the way the landscape of the soul is transformed by war,” this drama explores the impact of the war in Iraq through the personal lens of the Ortiz family in a way that is both shockingly realistic and creatively moving.

The play opened to positive reviews when it premiered with Page 73 Productions at The Culture Project in New York City on January 28, 2006. Directed by Davis McCallum, the production featured Zabryna Guevara, Mateo Gómez, Armando Riesco and Triney Sandoval. The New York Times raved about the show, calling it “that rare and rewarding thing: a theatre work that succeeds on every level, while creating something new,” while Time Out New York called it “simple, poignant and achingly evocative.” Since its premiere, the play has brought its poignance to regional theatres across the country, offering Latine actors the chance to bring this complex family – and complex dramatic question – to life.

Water by the Spoonful (US)

Hudes premiered a few other shows between the world premieres of the first and second play of this trilogy (including the story of a Puerto Rican immigrant brought up in Washington Heights, New York, which we will explore below) but returned to the stories of Puerto Rican immigrants brought up in Philadelphia in the second play in the trilogy, Water by the Spoonful, in 2012.

Beginning several years after the homecoming in Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue, this compassionate follow-up ventures beyond Elliot and beyond Philadelphia as it adds his mothers – one who raised him and one biological – and the online community that keeps the latter sober to the overall story. The poignant yet hopeful play examines addiction and recovery, family (both biological and found), identity and displacement, the lingering impact of war and the complex nature of online versus real-world communities and human connections. In this iteration, Elliot has returned from Iraq and is struggling to find his place in the world while living in Philadelphia. Somewhere in a chat room, recovering addicts – including his biological mother Odessa, who goes by the online moniker Haikumom – keep each other alive, hour by hour, day by day. The boundaries of community are stretched across continents and cyberspace as birth families splinter and online families collide in this “combination poem, prayer and app on how to cope in an age of uncertainty, speed and chaos” (Variety).

The play was originally commissioned and produced by Hartford Stage as part of Hudes’ 2008-2009 Aetna New Voices Fellowship, where it debuted at Hartford Stage on October 26, 2011. It then premiered off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre on December 11, 2012, featuring Armando Riesco, Liza Colón-Zayas and Zabryna Guevara. This iteration gave the play visibility and earned it the prestigious accolade of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012, whose committee described it as “an imaginative play about the search for meaning.”

The Happiest Song Plays Last (US)

Just a year after her Pulitzer Prize win, Hudes wrapped up Elliot’s story in the third and final play in the trilogy, The Happiest Song Plays Last. After the events of Water by the Spoonful, Elliot’s cousin and close friend Yasmin (colloquially, Yaz) decides to move back to their family’s place in North Philly. It is in that barrio living room that this final story begins as the activist-turned-music-professor Yaz moonlights as the local soup kitchen queen, cooking free rice and beans for any hungry neighbor. Halfway around the world, Elliot relives his military trauma on the set of a docudrama that’s filming in Jordan. With the Egyptian revolution booming in the distance, these two young adults try to sing a defiant song of legacy and love in the face of local and global unrest.

This final play in the trilogy first premiered in Chicago, Illinois at the Goodman Theatre on April 22, 2013. Directed by Edward Torres, the production featured Nelson González, James Harms, Sandra Marquez, Fawzia Mirza, Armando Riesco, Jaime Tirelli and Demetrios Troy. It subsequently premiered off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre on March 3, 2014 as the conclusion of their stagings of the full trilogy. Directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, the production featured Anthony Chisholm, Dariush Kashani, Tony Plana, Armando Riesco, Annapurna Sriram and Lauren Vélez as well as the musicians Nelson González, Nelson Jaime and John Rodriguez.

According to the Chicago Tribune, The Happiest Song Plays Last “not only comes with the unmistakable whiff of authenticity but conveys how none of our lives are entirely ordinary and how small stuff actually connects to all kinds of big stuff, be it matters of global import, community progress or the clichés of Hollywood representation,” and, like the two plays before it, brings the story of a Puerto Rican immigrant family – and those who their lives touch – to the stage with both poetic swagger and heartful realism.

In the Heights (US/UK)

Between the premieres of her plays in The Elliot Trilogy, Quiara Alegría Hudes took the ‘A’ train up to Washington Heights to collaborate with the multi-talented Lin-Manuel Miranda on the book for what would become a Midtown hit: the Broadway musical In the Heights.

The musical tells the universal story of a vibrant community in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood – a place where the coffee from the corner bodega is light and sweet, the windows are always open and the breeze carries the rhythm of three generations of music. It’s a community on the brink of change, full of hopes, dreams and pressures, where the biggest struggles can be deciding which traditions you take with you, and which ones you leave behind.

Lin-Manuel Miranda first began writing the show as a sophomore in college, where it was staged by the student theater company there and reportedly sounded like “a hip-hop version of Rent,” according to an interview with Miranda for Entertainment Tonight. There, it was noticed by a group of alumni and students including John Buffalo Mailer, Neil Patrick Stewart, Anthony Veneziale and Thomas Kail, who thought the show could aspire to Broadway. Kail joined as a collaborator in 2002 and shortly thereafter in 2004, Hudes joined as a bookwriter. Her expertise in the Pan-Latine community of North Philly – who Hudes described as “migratory because they have to be” in an interview with Yale News – translated to the similarly Pan-Latine community of Washington Heights. This allowed her, in her Tony-nominated book, to give authentic dimension to its 11 lead characters hailing from New York to Puerto Rico to Mexico – and even to one who is Chile-Domini-Curican but always says she’s from Queens!

Opening on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on March 9, 2008, the production starred Lin-Manuel Miranda himself as Usnavi alongside Andréa Burns, Janet Dacal, Robin De Jesús, Carlos Gomez, Mandy Gonzalez, Christopher Jackson, Priscilla Lopez, Olga Merediz, Karen Olivo, Eliseo Román, Seth Stewart and more. It would go on to be nominated for 13 Tony Awards, including Best Book of a Musical, and win four, including Best Musical. It would later be adapted into a celebrated film version directed by Jon Chu in June 2021.

26 Miles (US)

Also between the premieres of her plays in The Elliot Trilogy, Hudes explored the women of West Philadelphia on the road with her 2009 play, 26 Miles. 

Based on Hudes’ life growing up in West Philadelphia, this play follows a mother and daughter on a long road trip. The custody battle left them estranged for eight years. The road trip destination is two thousand miles across the country. The mother’s skin is brown, the teenage daughter’s white. So what if reality’s nipping at their heels? This reunited pair runs fast and furious from the secrets in their lives, hunting valuable antiques, chasing arctic explorers and getting lost in Wyoming’s wilderness. As with her depictions of women like Abuela Claudia and Camilla in In the Heights and Yaz and Odessa in The Elliot Trilogy, Hudes brings her lived experience as a woman from a migratory immigrant community for whom home is both urgent and transient to the stage, creating authentic, fully-dimensional female characters. According to the Denver Post, “The play’s greatest triumph is Beatriz… Frantic, foolish and unapologetically direct, Beatriz is one of the most original and refreshing matriarchs to come to any stage in a long, long time.”

Good things happen in threes. Starting in Atlanta, Georgia, the play first premiered at the Alliance Theatre on March 20, 2009 as part of a three-part world premiere. Directed by Kent Gash, the Atlanta production featured Bethany Anne Lind, Jason MacDonald, Triney Sandoval and Socorro Santiago. It then opened in Denver, Colorado at the Curious Theatre Company on May 9, 2009. Directed by Pesha Rudnick, the Denver production featured Gabriella Cavallero, Kevin Hart, José Antonio Mercado and Ana Noguera. It finally received its third world premiere in Coral Gables, Florida with the New Theatre on November 20, 2009. Directed by Ricky J. Martinez, the Florida production featured Evelyn Perez, Jackie Rivera, Christopher Vicchiollo and Derek Warriner. In each iteration, charm and spunk pepper a story that is ultimately “transforming and restorative.” (The New York Times)

Daphne’s Dive (US)

Most recently, Quiara Alegría Hudes returned to her home of North Philly with her slow-burn sketch of a local bar in Daphne’s Dive.

In a tucked away corner of North Philly, six regulars gather at a neighborhood watering hole. Over twenty years, they turn their collective memories into a vivacious mythology. The tales they’d rather forget, however, keep sneaking up and tapping them on the shoulder. At Daphne’s Dive, an aloe plant, a girl’s sneaker, a stiff drink, and mounds of trash become talismanic treasures to a group of outsiders trying to be “in” together. Daphne and her vibrant, eclectic regulars drink to art, politics and life. As Daphne’s adopted daughter – very different from her reserved and pragmatic mother – grows up, an unconventional family is forced to confront who’s an insider, who’s an outsider and the challenge of opening your heart to strangers in this play brimming with adversity, love and hope.

The play premiered off-Broadway at Signature Theatre on April 26, 2016. Directed by her In the Heights collaborator Thomas Kail, the production featured Vanessa Aspillaga, Carlos Gomez, KK Moggie, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Matthew Saldivar, Gordon Joseph Weiss and Samira Wiley. Hudes’ “fierce compassion for [these] characters and ardent love for Philadelphia’s diversity” brings an “unassailable heart” to this very specific slice of the world. It is by creating stories such as this – or any of the above plays, too – that Hudes demonstrates her talented craft, but also helps each reader to grow their empathy and awareness for just how diverse and beautiful our world is.

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Other works by Quiara Alegría Hudes include:

• Holy Broth (US) – A short play about communication, soap operas and the ways in which food is a universal language.
• The Day’s Mail (US) – A monologue about a man going through the day’s mail who receives a mysterious package and discovers a legacy that spans six generations of his family’s men.

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To read or license a play by Quiara Alegría Hudes, visit Concord Theatricals in the US or the UK.