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West Philly playwright Hudes is safe at home

Playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes will always be known as writer of the book for the 2008 Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights and for her 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Water by the Spoonful. But the West Philadelphia native should also win plaudits for her passionate dedication to her roots. Like Woody Allen with Manhattan or Raymond Chandler with Los Angeles, Hudes works Philly like a rib, gnawing at its fleshy edges, rejoicing in the meat of the matter.

Playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes , of the 2012 Pulitzer-winning "Water by the Spoonful," pays homage, as always, to her native Philadelphia in "Lulu's Golden Shoes," about coming of age as a Latina. (ANDE WHYLAND)
Playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes , of the 2012 Pulitzer-winning "Water by the Spoonful," pays homage, as always, to her native Philadelphia in "Lulu's Golden Shoes," about coming of age as a Latina. (ANDE WHYLAND)Read more

Playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes will always be known as writer of the book for the 2008 Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights and for her 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Water by the Spoonful. But the West Philadelphia native should also win plaudits for her passionate dedication to her roots. Like Woody Allen with Manhattan or Raymond Chandler with Los Angeles, Hudes works Philly like a rib, gnawing at its fleshy edges, rejoicing in the meat of the matter.

Of Puerto Rican and Jewish heritage, she was raised near 49th and Baltimore, but a series of her plays (and a children's book, Welcome to My Neighborhood) are set around 2nd and Norris Streets in North Philly.

"That's where my cousins and abuela [grandmother] were," she said of all-day hangs filled with cartoons, corner stores, and sidewalk games. "Even then, I was very protective of my cousins and witnessed how those blocks bolstered people's community spirit, but also posed real existential and practical questions about how to succeed and thrive in the face of much adversity."

Suffering and celebration went hand in hand there, and that's what she writes about: people who suffer and celebrate. This includes her next play, Daphne's Dive, to premiere next season at New York's Signature Theater. Based on her stepfather's Dauphin Street bar - once Sanchez Bar, now El Batey - it focuses on seven regulars over the course of 20 years. There's also The Day's Mail (about a single all-occasions suit worn by generations of men in one family); the walking-wounded Eliot, A Soldier's Fugue (a 2007 Pulitzer finalist); the activist dramedy The Happiest Song Plays Last, and Lulu's Golden Shoes, a seductive comic-book-loving comedy that Philadelphia's Flashpoint Theatre currently is staging at University of the Arts' Caplan Studio Theater.

Originally known as The Adventures of Barrio Grrrl!, Lulu was first produced in March 2005 at Miracle Theatre Group in Portland, Ore., after being developed in June 2004 at South Coast Repertory.

"Lulu's Golden Shoes was me railing, screaming to the universe about being a girl in an urban Latino landscape," says Hudes, ramping up about what made her tick as a child and how it affected what she would write.

"I'd seen overweight girls in my family be ridiculed for their body shapes. I'd seen cousins and neighbors deal with teen pregnancy, repressed sexuality, hypersexuality. I'd seen aunts and cousins survive or wither under domestic violence. And I also saw the joy, empowerment, and strength that came with womanhood, and how we passed our wisdom on to each other like little secrets, behind closed doors."

Hudes had pent-up feelings about it all; what came out was this frisky, bold play about a teenage Latina's sexual coming-of-age. "My feelings on the topic were so dark I thought, 'I can only write this as dark comedy.' It became then this fantastical comic-book world - by far my naughtiest piece of writing, dealing with sexuality in such unapologetic, spiritual, and bizarre terms. Like the scene where a girl sees her grandmother's naked body and is fascinated by it. To be clear, there's no actual nudity in the play, or even close. Yet the power of suggestion is strong. Come if you dare."

What always struck Hudes most about her West Philadelphia neighborhood was its diversity. There was Earl Wilke, whose Windsor Avenue house was a work of living sculpture. And Addimu Kumba, who fashioned functional African-inspired instruments out of trash and refuse. And Kathy Chang, with her stunning costumes (or near-nude noncostumes) and wild activist ways. "Neighbors connected through art and story in West Philly," she says.

Hudes' writing gracefully assays the Latina/Latino experience, hers, the world around her. While her mother and stepfather are Puerto Rican, her father is Jewish. Where does that fit into her definition of herself?

She describes the nature of the present when it comes to identity: "I'm moved by the fact that a woman who's been with a woman for 40 years might nonetheless identify as bi. Or that a woman who's been married to a man for a decade might still identify as queer.

"As someone of mixed cultural identity, there is something about this that feels deeply true to me. It honors complexity without dulling the edges. I do not question that there are many people whose identities are more singular - male, female, black, white, Latino.

"But my personal, lived experience bears out a complex set of combinations, labels, and inner truths. When I write a play that is mostly Latino characters, it is nonetheless a Jewish play. I feel comfortable asserting that, even though it may seem strange."

She graduated from Central High, studied music at Yale, got a master's at Brown, and now lives with her husband and daughter in New York. But every time Hudes walks through Philly, she is walking on top of history bigger than her own, "layers above my spiritual and blood ancestry."

When it came to Lulu's Golden Shoes - a sexy, satirical coming-of-age story about Ana, who finds her barrio grrrl power through her fantasy superheroine Rosie Lulu - the ancestral starting point was Hudes' younger sister, Gabriela Sanchez, founder and boss of the multiracial, cross-cultural Power Street Theatre company in North Philly and an advocate-artist in her own right.

"Back then, when I wrote the play, she was just a girl coming into her own, with me terrified by how society might suppress her inner spark of womanhood," says Hudes. "My sister has darker skin than I, she has an urban lilt to her speech, and has what I like to call 'righteous thighs.' Going to college, joining the theater community, she was just going to be different in a lot of the rooms she walked into.

"I wrote the play for her, a combination of devotion, love, and fear. I wrote it to serve like a protective shield for her."

Though Hudes calls Lulu her most personal play, she was apprehensive a decade ago about being so honest and naked before an audience and has not written in that style since.

"It was almost too raw," she says, daring audiences to take that wild ride into her past.

A GIRL GROWS UP

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Lulu's Golden Shoes

Presented by Flashpoint Theatre through Aug. 2 at University of the Arts' Caplan Studio Theatre, 211 S. Broad St.

Tickets: $22-$25.

Information: 267-997-3312 or www.flashpointtheatre.org.EndText