Play Guide ELLIOT // GUIDE //
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W R I T T E N BY Q U I A RA A L E G R Í A H U D E S D I R E C T E D B Y D AV I D L O Z A N O
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TA B L E O F
Contents PLAY GUIDE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
E D I T E D BY:
F O R M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N V I S I T
Kelsey Leigh Ervi Garrett Reeves Joanie Schultz
WAT E RT OW E RT H E AT R E .O RG O R
D E S I G N E D BY:
Emily Holt emilyfightscrime.com
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ELLIOT // GUIDE //
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THE PLAYWRIGHT ABOUT QUIARA ALEGRÍA HUDE S
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THE PLAY E L L I O T ’ S T R I L O GY
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W H AT I S A F U G U E ?
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T H R E E G E N E R AT I O N S O F WA R
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OUR PRODUCTION ABOUT THE SCENIC DESIGN
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MEET THE CAST
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G I V I N G B AC K
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ADDITIONAL UNDERSTANDING RESOURCES & FURTHER READING
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IT’S IN THE MUSIC:
Playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes
QUIARA IS A NYC-BASED PLAYWRIGHT & FEMINIST.
WWW.QU I A RA .COM E M A N C I PATE D_STORI E S_PROJEC T
B I O ( CO U RTE SY O F W W W.Q U I A RA .CO M ) : Quiara Alegría Hudes is a playwright, strong wife and mother of two, Distinguished Professor at Wesleyan University, barrio feminist, and native of West Philly, U.S.A. Hailed for her work’s exuberance, intellectual rigor, and rich imagination, her plays and musicals have been performed around the world. They include Water By the Spoonful, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; In the Heights, winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical and Pulitzer finalist; and Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, another Pulitzer finalist. Hudes is a playwright in residence at Signature Theater in New York, and Profile Theatre in Portland Oregon dedicated its 2017 season to producing her work. Originally trained as a composer, Hudes writes at the intersection of music and drama. She has collaborated with renowned musicians including Nelson Gonzalez, Michel Camilo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Erin McKeown, and The Cleveland Orchestra.
@ Q U I A RA H U DE S
Hudes recently founded a crowd-sourced testimonial project, Emancipated Stories, which seeks to put a personal face on mass incarceration by having inmates share one page of their life story with the world.
ELLIOT // GUIDE //
QUOTE S FRO M QUIA RA: “Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue was the first play where I consciously incorporated music.
There was an organic discovery and then there was also an intellectual decision-making process, which was that the story was about three generations who are following in each other’s footsteps. As I was visualizing the play, before I even started writing it, I just imagined three characters and their lives happening, their stories happening, on top of each other. It just visually felt like a fugue to me.” – Pulled from Guernica Magazine “When I started writing the first play in the trilogy, Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue, I was very nervous. I wanted to deal with the war, but I wanted to deal with it through a lens of joy and that was wonderful and it opened up a different angle on war to me.” – Pulled from NPR
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( C O U R T E S Y O F A M E R I C A N T H E AT R E ) :
Elliot’s Trilogy // EDITS MADE FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY
Quiara Alegría Hudes didn’t set out to write a trilogy, but she eventually felt compelled to. “When I had the realization that I wanted to continue with Elliot, I saw both part two and part three before me as a coming-of-age trilogy,” she says. As with many of her plays, there is a real-life correlative for the trilogy, and she didn’t change his name: her own cousin, Elliot Ruiz. “Elliot has had such an improbable and extraordinary life,” Hudes says of her inspiration. “He is funny and charming and still gross like a boy sometimes, but he’s also very sophisticated in his social skills. I’m just as drawn to his personality as to his story.” She sees Elliot’s story as both quintessentially American and a great representation of the Puerto Rican experience, including the rough patches and demons he has had to survive to become stable and successful. In Elliot, audiences hear directly from Elliot, his father, and his grandfather as they reflect on their own war experiences, as well as those of Ginny, his mother. Water by the Spoonful is far more ambitious in scope and style than Elliot, for various reasons.
“The content demanded it, but I also wanted to give myself new challenges,” Hudes says. Having seen August: Osage County, Jerusalem, and the Signature Theatre Company revival of Angels in America, Hudes thought to herself, “Let me make a big mess!” Meanwhile, in The Happiest Song Plays Last, Hudes uses technology to create a firewall in communication. Elliot is in Jordan, where he is suddenly transformed from consultant on a movie about the Iraq war to the film’s star. (This actually happened, with the 2007 movie Battle for Haditha.)
What all three plays have in common, Hudes says, is that they deal “with the things we don’t talk about.” In Elliot, that meant paring back the dialogue, even some that she felt was her best writing. “I was dealing with the limits of face-to-face conversation. There are so many things that can’t be said, that feel safer when you’re not looking someone in the eyes.”
ELLIOT // GUIDE //
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Fugue? W H AT I S A
DEFINITION:
A musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices and contrapuntally developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts.
(COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA)
A fugue usually has three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a final entry that contains the return of the subject in the fugue’s tonic key. In the Middle Ages, the term was widely used to denote any works in canonic style; by the Renaissance, it had come to denote specifically imitative works. Since the 17th century, the term fugue has described what is commonly regarded as the most fully developed procedure of imitative counterpoint. Most fugues open with a short main theme, the subject, which then sounds successively in each voice (after the first voice is finished stating the subject, a second voice repeats the subject at a different pitch, and other voices repeat in the same way); when each voice has entered, the exposition is complete. This is often followed by a connecting passage, or episode, developed from previously heard
material; further “entries” of the subject then are heard in related keys. Episodes (if applicable) and entries are usually alternated until the “final entry” of the subject, by which point the music has returned to the opening key, or tonic, which is often followed by closing material, the coda. In this sense, a fugue is a style of composition, rather than a fixed structure. The famous fugue composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) shaped his own works after those of Johann Jakob Froberger (1616–1667), Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1643), Dieterich Buxtehude (c. 1637–1707) and others. With the decline of sophisticated styles at the end of the baroque period, the fugue’s central role waned, eventually giving way as sonata form and the symphony orchestra rose to a dominant position.
Three Generations O F WA R IRAQ WAR WHEN: 2003 – 2011 REASON
( C O U R T E S Y O F W W W.W I K I P E D I A . O R G ) :
The primary rationalization for the Iraq War was articulated by a joint resolution of the United States Congress known as the Iraq Resolution. The U.S. stated that the intent was to remove “a regime that developed and used weapons of mass destruction, that harbored and supported terrorists, committed outrageous human rights abuses, and defied the just demands of the United Nations and the world.” For the invasion of Iraq the rationale was “the United States relied on the authority of UN Security Council Resolutions 678 and 687 to use all necessary means to compel Iraq to comply with its international obligations.” In the lead-up to the invasion, the U.S. and UK emphasized the argument that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and that he thus presented a threat to his neighbors and to the world community.
At the heart of the conflict was the desire of North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of Vietnam in 1954, to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modeled after those of the Soviet Union and China. The South Vietnamese government, on the other hand, fought to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West. PEOPLE’S RESPONSE:
A poll taken in 1965 showed that 64% of Americans supported our involvement in Vietnam. By 1970, 55% of Americans supported withdrawing troops from Vietnam. A M E R I C A N S W H O S E RV E D : 3.4 million A M E R I C A N S K I L L E D : 58,220 T O TA L P E O P L E K I L L E D : 1.3 million
PEOPLE’S RESPONSE:
KO R EA N WA R
72% of Americans supported the war when it began. 78% of Americans supported the decision to withdraw from Iraq. A M E R I C A N S W H O S E R V E D : 1.5 million A M E R I C A N S K I L L E D : 4,486 T O TA L P E O P L E K I L L E D : 500,000
WHEN: 1950 – 1953
V I ETNAM WA R W H E N : 1 9 6 4 – 1 9 75 ( C O U RT E SY O F W W W. B R I TA N N I C A .C O M ) : The Vietnam War was a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. Called the “American War” in Vietnam (or, in full, the “War Against the Americans to Save the Nation”), the war was also a manifestation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.
REASON
R E AS O N
( C O U RT E SY O F W W W. ST U DY.C O M ) :
The end of the Second World War meant peace and prosperity for Americans and many other people around the world. Yet, for the Koreans, it represented difficulty. Korea was part of the Japanese empire throughout the first half of the 20th century. When Japan fell during World War II, Korea was suddenly free, and hoped to finally be able to decide the fate of their own country. Most Koreans campaigned for a unified state. However, the United States and the Soviet Union had different ideas. The Soviets wanted to expand the sphere of communist influence into Korea. The United States countered by encouraging the establishment of democracy.
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This disagreement would eventually lead to the Korean War. The Korean War was the first battle of the Cold War, and first major proxy war fought between the United States and a Soviet communist supported enemy. A proxy war occurs when one or more opposing powers instigates a war and then uses third parties to fight on their behalf.
W I T H I N T H E M A N G ROV E S :
The Scenic Design OF ELLIOT
At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the Allies decided to split Korea into two parts at the 38th parallel. North Korea became a Soviet-supported communist regime under the leadership of Kim Il-sung; South Korea became a U.S.-supported democratic state under Syngman Rhee. After the division of Korea, Kim Il-sung looked to unify the nation. He garnered support from the Soviet Union and China to launch an invasion in South Korea, and remove those who supported Syngman Rhee’s appearance of democracy. Armed with Soviet rifles and tanks, North Korea crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950; the war was underway. PEOPLE’S RESPONSE:
In 1950, 78% of Americans supported the decision to send ground troops into Korea. By 1953, only 50% of Americans still supported the decision. A M E R I C A N S W H O S E RV E D :
1.8 million A M E R I C A N S K I L L E D : 36,574 T O TA L P E O P L E K I L L E D : 2.5 million
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SCENIC DESIGN I N S P I R AT I O N
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ELLIOT // GUIDE //
03 SCENIC DESIGN GROUND PLAN
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FINAL SCENIC DESIGN MODEL
SCENIC DESIGN BY BRIAN CLINNIN
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THE CAST ELLIOT
GINNY
CHRISTOPHER
GLORIA VIVICA
LLEWYN RAMIREZ
B E N AV I D E S
POP D AV I D L U G O
GRANDPOP RODNEY GARZA
GIVING
BACK This season, WaterTower launched the “Pay It Forward with Pay What You Can” initiative in which all proceeds from our PWYC performances are donated to various causes and organizations in need. For Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, donations were raised for the UNIDOS Disaster Relief and Recovery Program. In response to the immense devastation created by Hurricane Maria, the Hispanic
Federation convened government, community, and philanthropic institutions and leaders to create the UNIDOS Disaster Relief and Recovery Program. The goal of the UNIDOS Program is to serve the immediate and long-term needs of families and communities in Puerto Rico. To do so, the Federation has taken unprecedented action, helping to coordinate hundreds of donation drives in the U.S. mainland, distributing millions of pounds of food, water, and essentials to those most affected by the storm, delivering emergency relief aid to over 70 municipalities, and seeding an additional three million dollars to support emergency relief and recovery projects throughout Puerto Rico.
T O D O N AT E T O H U R R I C A N E R E L I E F E F F O R T S I N P U E R T O R I C O , V I S I T H I S PA N I C F E D E R AT I O N U N I D O S . O R G
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Additional U N D E R S TA N D I N G
V E TE RA N R E SO U RC E S www.northtexas.va.gov www.dallascounty.org/department/veterans www.veteransresourcecenter.org www.bluestarfam.org www.airpowerfoundation.com www.texvet.org www.navymwrfortworth.com www.hvsd.org www.fisherhouse.org A M E R I CA N FA L L E N SO L D I E R S PROJ E C T www.americanfallensoldiers.com LO CA L PU E RTO R I CO A FFI L I AT I O N S www.aprdfw.org www.texasprf.org www.tricountyrhchamber.org To learn more about the playwright and her work, visit www.quiara.com. FU RTH E R R EA D I N G Complete the trilogy by reading Water by the Spoonful and The Happiest Song Plays Last
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