Water By The Spoonful

Yazmin, referred to as Yaz throughout the play, is Elliot’s cousin and the niece of Mami Ginny and Mami Odessa. She is twenty-nine, Puerto Rican, and an adjunct music instructor. She is getting divorced from her husband and continually struggles with the dissonance between the culture and family in which she was raised, and the way she leads her life as an adult. When she teaches her class about the role of dissonance in jazz, she stresses that it leads to freedom in music. Elliot believes that Yazmin had a very different life than his and that she could not have survived in el barrio. Instead of going to the neighborhood public school, she went to an all-white prep school, married a man from a presumably upper-class background, and owns a piano that costs more than her aunt’s house. Yaz and Elliot have a loving and supportive relationship, even as they acknowledge the chaos and dysfunction of their larger family. At the end of the play, Yaz embraces the dissonance of her fragmented identity and seeks to reconnect with her roots by buying Mami Ginny’s house, moving back into the traditional Puerto Rican neighborhood, and covering as the new site administrator for the chat room while Odessa goes to rehab.

Haikumom is thirty-nine, Puerto Rican, and works odd janitorial jobs. She is the founder of the website www.recovertogether.com, where several of the characters chat online as they work through therecovery process. Haikumom is the site administrator and often composes haikus for the users. She is in recovery for crack cocaine addiction. While chatting on the site, she is calm and Zen-like, encouraging and nurturing the other users like a mother. In her interaction with Yaz and Elliot, she is angry and short-tempered. When she was younger, her addiction led her to neglect her children, Elliot and Mary Lou. Mary Lou died when she was two years old from dehydration. When Elliot tells this story to John in front of Yaz and Odessa, Odessa later relapses and has to be rushed to the hospital. After being urged by Orangutan and Chutes&Ladders, John agrees to take care of Odessa and helps get her into rehab. Just like Elliot, Odessa makes progress on the path from trauma to healing. The events in Odessa’s life suggest the path to recovery is a cyclical journey that has the ability to repeat itself. 

Fountainhead is a white, forty-one-year-old male who works as a computer programmer and is married with children. He logs into the recovery chat room and is hammered by the other users when he refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of his addiction to crack. He thinks he can beat it by sheer willpower and access to the “experts” (the other people in the recovery chat room). Although not explicitly stated in the text, his username seems to reference Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, a novel that praises self-reliance as the way to achieve one’s goals. John meets Odessa in person, and she tries to encourage him to seek help, be honest with his wife about his addiction, and go to a rehabilitation facility. The hospital calls John when Odessa is hospitalized after her overdose because Odessa puts his name down as her emergency contact. After being encouraged by the other users on the site, John decides to take care of Odessa, brings her home from the hospital, bathes her, and plans to check her into a rehab. John also decides to be honest with his wife about his addiction. These selfless actions suggest that John is making progress in his recovery. 

Chutes&Ladders is a fifty-six-year-oldblack male. He lives in San Diego and has a low-level job at the IRS. He is recovering from an addiction to crack and is a frequent visitor to the recovery chat room. Chutes&Ladders, Orangutan, and Haikumom have a very tight-knit bond and chat online frequently. Orangutan invites Chutes&Ladders to come visit her in Japan because she wants to try and be friends in real life. Chutes&Ladders resists at first, insisting that having a safe and boring life is the key to maintaining his sobriety. In the first act, he tells a story about almost drowning while high and being terrified of the water ever since. Haikumom mails him water wings in an attempt to encourage him to try to be brave and experience life. Because of the encouragement of the online friendship found in the chat room, Chutes&Ladders attempts to call his estranged son, hanging up in fear after his son picks up the phone. In the end, his need for connection wins and he travels to Japan to meet Orangutan and attempt a friendship in real life. 

Orangutan is thirty-one years old and has recently graduated from community college. She is Japanese by birth but was adopted by an American family as an infant. Her birthname is Yoshiko Sakai. She struggles with an addiction to crack and is much newer to the process of recovery than her online friends and recovery mentors, Haikumom and Chutes&Ladders. She travels to Japan to find her birth family, and then invites Chutes&Ladders to come and meet her in person. Orangutan is not looking for a romantic connection with Chutes&Ladders; she wants to try having a friendship with someone in real life and spending time together, rather than just communicating electronically. She is over the moon when Chutes&Ladders actually shows up in Japan, and they introduce themselves to each other by their real names.