English was the playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes’s first language. However her mom’s home, in North Philadelphia, sheltered different tongues — Spanish, Spanglish, the brash gold-hoops-and-spandex sass of her older cousins.
From piano lecturers, she realized the language of classical music; from her paternal aunt, punk rock; from backyards and stoops, bachata. Her magnet college gave her Flannery O’Connor and Arthur Miller. The free library gave her James Baldwin and Sandra Cisneros. There was Judaism from her father, Lukumí from her mom, and the Quaker religion that she found later. Meals was a language. Grief was a language. Some dialects she spoke simply. Others got here more durable. Her youth appears to have been a seek for a vernacular that was all her personal.
“My life required explication,” Hudes writes in “My Damaged Language,” her autobiographical new play on the Signature Theater. “And I didn’t have the language to make it make sense.”
Thought of narrowly, the play, additionally directed by Hudes, is a narrative of how one younger lady discovered her voice. However that implies one thing extra linear and fewer atmospheric than what “My Damaged Language” supplies: an try — poignant, if not completely profitable — to summon generations of willful girls to the stage. The present, which honors the numerous girls in Hudes’s maternal line, is a young collision of scene and picture, an impressionistic collage somewhat than an easy biography.
The play is lifted, nearly verbatim, from Hudes’s 2021 memoir of the identical title. That ebook, which reaffirms her presents for exhaustive empathy and feisty prose, is extra capacious. The theatrical model shrinks timelines, characters and tales.
The sections on Hudes’s father don’t seem right here, and her discussions of music and faith are enormously lowered. Her faculty years (throughout which I typically noticed her on the Yale campus) have vanished completely. The primary character, referred to within the script because the Creator, seems in a single scene as an nearly 18-year-old, dyeing her cousin’s hair. Within the subsequent she is 26, a graduate scholar at Brown. The present additionally leaves out a dialog, with Paula Vogel, who ran the playwriting program at Brown, which supplies the ebook and the play their shared title.
“Your Spanish is damaged?” Vogel tells a youthful Hudes. “Then write your damaged Spanish.”
What stays is the Creator’s bodily and mental growth. Within the opening part, the Creator will get her first interval. Within the closing one, she writes her first play. What occurs in between is evocative, but the script feels thinner than Hudes’s earlier performs — “Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue,” “Water by the Spoonful” and “The Happiest Tune Performs Final” — which have traversed a few of this identical familial terrain.
Below Hudes’s route, the Creator is performed by 5 performers referred to collectively on the pages of the script as Grrrls, a lippy Greek refrain. Every additionally takes a solo flip with the narration. The voice all through is just not the voice of Hudes at 13 or 16 or 26, however of the mature artist utilizing the brainy, gutsy idiolect that she ultimately developed to recall the lady she was.
Daphne Rubin-Vega, along with her very important, scalpel-like means of carving out a personality, and Zabryna Guevara, animated and incisive, play the Creator most frequently, with Yani Marin, Samora la Perdida and Marilyn Torres filling out the ensemble. Arnulfo Maldonado’s green-blue tiled set suggests a patio and a rest room and locations extra summary, locations of formality. The profusion of home vegetation, and Jennifer Schriever’s heat, practically tropical lighting suggests devotion and homegrown magic.
Even contemplating the pianist onstage, and Ebony Williams’s choreography, frisky or sinuous or jerky, because the second requires, “My Damaged Language” isn’t actually a play. Which it is aware of. As a result of the prose is barely hardly ever reframed as dialogue, scenes are reported as usually as they’re enacted. However there’s a honest try to discover a theatrical language that captures the love and pleasure and ache of studying, that celebrates the grandmother, mom, aunts and cousins from whom Hudes realized. That is at its core a reminiscence play, and to recollect means not solely to recall, but additionally to piece again collectively. That’s at work right here, too — an effort to collect up the fragments of a girl’s life and argot and make of it one thing entire.
My Damaged Language
By Nov. 27 on the Pershing Sq. Signature Heart, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Working time: 1 hour half-hour.
Supply: NY Times
