No Place Like Home

Quiara Alegría Hudes tells a Philadelphia story all her own.

By Alexis Greene

Playwrights often have landscapes that feed their art—physical places that are also places of the heart, to which these dramatists frequently turn for stories, characters and ambience.

For Beth Henley, that place has been a sliver of a Mississippi town that goes by the fictional name of Hazlehurst. For Lanford Wilson, it is Lebanon, Mo., where he was born.

The locale that nourishes the plays of Quiara Alegría Hudes is Philadelphia. The culturally varied worlds of North Philly infuse her early play The Adventures of Barrio Grrrl! and the later Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue, and echo as well in her book for last season’s Tony-winning musical In the Heights, set in another ethnically rich urban landscape, New York City’s Washington Heights. And Hudes’s experience of growing up in West Philly, the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a Jewish father, fuels the coming-of-age tale at the center of her much-anticipated new play 26 Miles, which will receive two productions in 2008–09, beginning this spring at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre.

“I love the neighborhoods,” declares Hudes of her hometown. “Growing up in West Philly and having family in North Philly placed me in two very distinct neighborhoods, both with a strong sense of community and history, where interesting ethnicities and nationalities were always mingling. In addition, my Jewish aunt has lived and worked in the Italian market for 30 years—she sells coffee. And my uncle is a butcher there. One of my best friends from school lived in Chinatown. There were endless places to discover and explore.”

It is a burningly hot, early July day in Philadelphia, but Hudes and I are sitting at a table in a cool loft apartment that looks out across a subdued, residential section of North Philly. Hudes has been living in New York City since 2003, when she finished Brown University’s MFA playwriting program, but she has returned to her old haunts in Philadelphia for a year while her husband, Raymond Beauchamp—another Philly native, Hudes’s high school sweetheart and a recent law-school graduate—clerks here for a federal judge. Today their 17-month-old daughter, Cecilia, is at day care at the federal courthouse, leaving Hudes free to talk—and, in the afternoon, to drive us to a few of the Philadelphia landmarks that mean the most to her.

Sitting in her apartment or navigating the city, stories about her family pour forth: about how her mother arrived from Puerto Rico in 1954, at the age of 12, with her four sisters and Hudes’s grandmother, or abuela. Hudes’s grandfather, who was a farmer, did not come.

Harlem, not Philadelphia, was the family’s first stop. “Everybody came to New York,” says Hudes. “That was the place to go.”

After about a week, so family lore has it, the women went out to buy avocados and returned to their apartment to find that all their belongings had been stolen—beds, chairs, everything. They didn’t know what to do. But a neighbor lent them a car and they drove down to Philadelphia, where the grandmother’s older sister was living. They never left.

“It’s easy to see why I became a writer in a family like that,” Hudes observes with a smile. “What are you going to do, not tell the story?”

Hudes’s personal story begins on St. Bernard Street, on a quiet block of twin Victorian houses—“a very first-step neighborhood,” says Hudes. It was here that Virginia Perez, a sometime hippie who was working for the American Friends Service Committee, and Henry Hudes, a carpenter and house-builder, were living in 1977 when a daughter was born. “Quiara means beloved,” says Hudes. “Alegría means happiness. The names were my mom’s invention.”

Her parents separated when Quiara was five or six, and her mother eventually married an entrepreneur who had also emigrated from Puerto Rico. “My stepfather is a total businessman,” says Hudes. “He has had so many businesses rooted in this community—pizzerias, real estate, bars, restaurants. The father who owns the taxi stand in In the Heights is kind of modeled after him.”

The house on St. Bernard Street is a short distance from Baltimore Avenue, where Hudes would get the trolley to Center City and then take the “El” to North Philly to spend time with her aunts, cousins or grandmother. “Grandma was almost a daily stop,” recalls the playwright. “Her place was the clearinghouse for all the neighbors—her door was always unlocked, and she always had a pot of beans and rice on, or coffee. You would meet a lot of characters, hear a lot of stories, passing through her kitchen or her living room.”

A line from Barrio Grrrl! describes “the edge of the barrio—the border between trash and gold.” “Going from West Philly, or from Center City, to North Philly,” Hudes says, “you would see these nice houses, with nice paint on the window ledges and all that stuff. Then block by block you’d see it transform. Alongside the nice houses would be a vacant lot filled up with tires. Then there’d be three vacant lots, and one house that’s boarded up, and one that has burned down. I learned to be aware of that class dichotomy, even within my own family. A lot of Barrio Grrrl! came out of me being frustrated that there were members of my family with whom I was very close, but who, in terms of the infrastructure of Philadelphia, were invisible and unknown.”

Though she saw her father irregularly after her parents broke up, it was his sister who influenced Hudes’s early career path. “My aunt Linda Hudes composed music for the Big Apple Circus for nearly 20 years,” says the playwright, “and before that, she was a rock musician. She had her own band, the Linda Hudes Power Trio. She says that, from the time I could sit up, she put me at the piano, and I would play along with records. I also wrote stories and poems from a very young age, but because of my aunt, who was so successful and had such a wonderful life in New York, music seemed a logical career.”

That ambition brought Hudes to Yale University and what she describes as “complete culture shock.” By her own account an “ambitious, punky kid,” Hudes took music and composition seriously; but nothing had prepared her for the challenges of New Haven. “There I was, a freshman, the first person in my family to go to college, sitting in an advanced composition class with 20 guys—I was the only girl there—and the level of their conversation was so sophisticated, I didn’t understand half the vocabulary they were using.”

She got over that. At Yale, Hudes’s composing talents flourished, and, with the assistance of fellowships, she wrote two original musicals: Sweat of the River, Sweat of the Ocean and Breakaway, Steal. The first, about a girl who takes a trip into her ancestral history, was inspired by Hudes’s own first visit to Puerto Rico, when she was 10 or 12. The second, about an enslaved African-American woman who frees herself and her mother by gathering spiritual sustenance from a mystical figure she encounters in the woods, utilized American spirituals and invocations of Santeria, an Afro-Caribbean religious tradition derived from the beliefs of the Yoruba people of Nigeria.

Back in Philly in 1999, Hudes’s music career thrived—she had gigs all over the place, composing for dance companies, working as a studio musician, touring with her own piano soul band. She was making enough money to quit her part-time job. So why was she dissatisfied?

“I got restless—for the first time in my life, I was bored, and I didn’t understand why,” Hudes offers. Her mother reminded Hudes about “those two musicals” and asked her why she had abandoned writing. “‘Your music is really great,’” Hudes recalls her mother saying, “‘but what you did with your writing is something I don’t think anyone else has tried to do. I don’t know why you’ve never thought about that for a career.’ And the second she said that, I knew: ‘She’s absolutely right. That’s exactly what I ought to do with my life!’”

Soon afterward, Hudes applied to Brown.

We brave the heat to walk to las cazuelas, a relaxing Mexican restaurant a few blocks away on West Girard Avenue. Then we drive to the home of Hudes’s Aunt Eugenia, or Ginny, on Berks Street, to say hello (she raised Hudes’s cousin Elliot, of Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue), and we drop in on a lush neighborhood garden nearby. Hudes’s plays, and the theatre community’s response to them, have borne out her life-decision. The two works she completed at Brown, Barrio Grrrl! (first staged by Miracle Theatre Group of Portland, Ore.) and Yemaya’s Belly (premiered at Portland Stage Company of Maine) exude theatricality, boldness and energy. “School is a time of experimentation,” says Hudes with a touch of amusement, “and I totally used it. I erred on the side of no-holds-barred writing. I’d use the ‘bake-off method’—just give myself 48 hours to complete the draft of a play.”

Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, a delicate drama about three generations of Latino men who go to war, was a 2007 nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The drama’s quiet style and precise architecture are a radical departure from the aggressive, fantasy-filled writing of the earlier plays. One of the men is based on Elliot, who enlisted in the Marines when he was 17, was injured in Iraq and sent back to his base in California. “He was this ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ character,” Hudes recounts, “with a big cheeseburger smile, really charming, really lovable. I saw him in California and he was the same character, but after Iraq there was something different.”

She did not want to write a war play, Hudes insists—too heavy and depressing, especially for a dramatist who says she lives the tone of each of her scripts. “I realized that if I focused on the happiest moments in my characters’ lives, that was a way in for me.” No “bake-off method” this time—Elliot involved research, contemplation, imagining the three men’s stories “on top of each other visually.” That visualization looked to Hudes like the staff lines of a fugue, and that discovery led to the first draft of Elliot, in which, as she puts it, the men’s stories are “in relief,” counterpointing all their differences and similarities.

Hudes was still at Brown when she was approached to work on the book for an in-progress musical called In the Heights, which was destined for Off Broadway. By 2004, she had joined the creative team headed by composer and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Even for a dramatist with years of book-writing collaboration behind her, the project would have been a challenge. There was already an extant script, with a full complement of songs. Perhaps even more daunting, the show, while not 24-year-old Miranda’s actual autobiography, was a deeply personal undertaking for him. Says Hudes, “This show was clearly Lin’s child. So I was confused.”

Hudes describes the process as a “weird tango.” She inherited characters, but involved them in new plots, notably the ups-and-downs of three businesses on the musical’s iconic block in Washington Heights. She avers that, even though she and Miranda are dissimilar as artists—“He speaks in this kind of hip-hop language, and my writing’s a little different from that”—they communicated well. “One thing Lin and I agreed on from the start,” declares Hudes, “is the love in that musical. There’s something unique in Puerto Rican, Dominican, Latino communities in the U.S.—and that’s an abundance of love. I did feel I was able to get more conflict into the show for the Broadway draft, which is what I wanted to do.” Miranda took home a Tony this past June for his In the Heights music and lyrics, and the show won the best-musical trophy, but the award for best book went to Stew for Passing Strange.

As we drive along the wide, white-hot thorough-fares of North Philly, Hudes admits to having been disappointed at being passed over for the theatre’s chief accolade. But clearly she is proud of her accomplishment. “I get letters from people saying, ‘Thank you for showing a side of the community that never gets shown.’ In fact, that is my experience up there on the stage—all those things that are part of the American dream, rather than someone getting busted on a street corner.”

Maybe it was the experience of toiling on such a public event as a Broadway-bound musical. Or perhaps it was the arrival of her daughter, who was born practically on the eve of In the Heights’s February ’07 Off-Broadway opening. But whatever the impetus, Hudes decided that her next work, 26 Miles, would be about herself and her relationships with her parents. The play’s adolescent Olivia, an imaginative, burgeoning writer, and open-minded, effervescent Beatriz, her mother, are, says Hudes, “very much sculpted after the real-life me and Mom.” Olivia’s conflict—whether to live with her father, who has custody, but whose new live-in lady does not care for the girl, or to move in with Beatriz and her man—draws on the custody war that Henry Hudes and Virginia Perez fought over their daughter. And, as in the real-life version, Olivia’s father is white and her mother is Latina: “I wanted to write a play about what it means to be of mixed identity, mixed ethnicity, and how somebody figures that out.”

26 Miles combines some of the far-out theatricality of Hudes’s earliest plays with the structural control of Elliot. Olivia’s private journey is a wild, once-in-a-lifetime road trip with her mother—a fantasy made real. It is Philadelphia meeting the landscape of the Wild American West, with all the longing and abandon that convergence implies.

And how can one not tell that story?

Alexis Greene is a critic and author based in New York City, and a frequent contributor to this magazine.