Water By The Spoonful

“This is a long time to have a phrase stuck in your head.” 

Elliot has been back from Iraq for three years, with this phrase stuck in his mind. This line suggests that there are no time limits to trauma and pain. People have to face traumatic events in their past (near or distant) to experience healing in the present, and those traumatic events can return again, even after they seem to vanish. 

“Rough translation, ‘Can I please have my passport back?’” 

The phrase that Elliot wants translated seems innocuous enough, and the audience never learns what it really means to him. This represents an undercurrent of the play–a trauma from the past haunting a character in the present. 

“Japan…Wow, that little white rock sure doesn’t discriminate.”

Chutes&Ladders, an African-American male, is surprised to learn that Orangutan is Japanese. It’s a small moment, but it highlights that everyone is vulnerable to pain and addiction. It’s also one of the few, but key, references to race/ethnicity in the play. The Ortiz family is Puerto Rican, and each of the other characters is from a different cultural background. It’s not discussed explicitly in the play but is certainly a piece of the overall theme of different people coming together in harmony (the chat room) or in discord (Yaz’s divorce from a man with a different socio-cultural background).