Hudes won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for drama with this searing play about  modern life in urban American in the early 21st C.   The  child of a Jewish father and a Puerto Rican mother, Hudes was initially headed for a career in music after studying at Yale, but an MFA from Brown turned her to the theater. Her screenplay for In the Heights and for an animated movie with Lin Manual Miranda have brought her popular fame while the Pulitzer marked her as a playwright of note.

This powerful play features memorable characters on a stage that is bleakly bare and divided into two halves—-one with real, live action and the other with virtual conversation through a web site for former addicts  fighting to stay clean from crack cocaine.  We meet immigrant Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, some successful at supporting their community and achieving higher education and a good job, some addicted to crack and suffering from the impact of poverty and urban blight. Several characters provide the tie between the two halves of the stage.  On one side are three ‘recovering addicts’ and one user:   Haikumom, the founder of www.recovertogether.com, Orangutan, a Japanese woman who had been raised in the US after being given up for adoption, and Chutes and Ladders, an African-American in San Diego who has worked in a low level job at the IRS for years are fighting to stay sober every day. Fountainhead, a successful entrepreneur and CEO in Philadelphia is struggling to admit his addiction.  Haikumom is the estranged  mother of Elliot, who is on the ‘live’ side of the stage along with Yazmin.  Eliot is a wounded (both physically and mentally) Iraq War veteran who works at Subway but dreams of a career as an actor in Hollywood.  Yazmin, his successful cousin who is on the faculty at Swarthmore, is tightly connected to Eliot and is hoping to help him realize his dreams.

The wrenching and painful dialogue rings true, as the action shifts back and forth between the web site conversations and the live world where Eliot and Yaz confront the death of Yaz’s mother and the overdose of Eliot’s estranged mother.  The web site’s participants survive and share hope, and Eliot and Yaz embark on new lives.  Sound trite?  Not at all, in this powerful hard-hitting and memorable piece of award-winning theater.