I’m really excited to be attending the opening night of Water by the Spoonful, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Quiara Alegria Hudes, tonight. Hudes is a Philadelphia native of Jewish and Puerto Rican descent.

As reported on NPR’s Morning Edition:

Water by the Spoonful is the second play in a trilogy featuring a character named Elliot, an injured Iraq war veteran who has returned to his home in North Philadelphia. Elliot is based on Hudes’ cousin, also named Elliot. She says she went to visit him on a military base shortly after he returned from Iraq.

“I just remember the instant I saw him, there was just something changed in his eye,” Hudes says. “You know, he was still absolutely the same young clown of a cousin I had always known and had grown up with, loving, but there was something different. And I felt that I might never understand it. And that’s the simple spark that it came from.”

As Hudes began writing about Elliot’s experiences, she says she noticed there were more and more young people in uniform showing up in Elliot’s Latino neighborhood in North Philadelphia. She thought to herself: “It’s not just Elliot’s story. This is going to be the story of a generation.”

Read the rest of Morning Edition’s report, or listen to the audio segment, here.

Buy tickets to Water by the Spoonful here.