AJOLT OF
EMPATHY
AN INTERVIEW WITH QUIARA ALEGRÍA HUDES
With Daphne’s Dive, Residency Five
playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes brings
her native Philadelphia to the Romulus
Linney Courtyard Theatre. Set in a
North Philly bar, the play features a
group of activists, artists, and friends
whose lives are forever changed when
a young girl unexpectedly enters their
world. Daphne’s Dive marks both the
inaugural play of Hudes’s residency
and her first since completing her
acclaimed Elliot trilogy in 2013.
Beginning with Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue
and concluding with The Happiest
Song Plays Last, the trilogy portrays
an Iraq War veteran returning home
to Philadelphia, and the challenges
and opportunities he finds there.
The trilogy’s second part, Water by the
Spoonful, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize
for Drama. Daphne’s Dive also reunites
Hudes with collaborator Thomas Kail,
who directed the Tony Award-winning
musical In the Heights, for which
Hudes wrote the book.
Before beginning rehearsals,
Hudes spoke with Literary Associate
Nathaniel French about beginning her
Signature residency, her relationship
with Signature Legacy playwright
Paula Vogel, and the tradition of
activism that suffuses her work.
7
Signature: When did you first realize that you were meant to be a playwright?
Quiara Alegría Hudes: Certain vocations find people, and this one found me.
I was writing before my memory even begins.
S: What role did Paula Vogel play in that development?
QAH: Paula was my mentor at Brown University, where I got an MFA.
She modeled for me what the life of a writer looks like: that there is joy,
remuneration, and fulfillment to be found in the collaborative and solitary
aspects of playwriting. She didn’t impose rules or a school of thought.
Rather, she geared me inwardly, instructing me to train my own ear, critically,
and with curiosity. She is a humble hedonist – relishing life’s small and grand
pleasures, which in my years at Brown and since then have included fine
ouzo, ice cream tastings, and Cape Cod sunsets. It has been one of the
great sisterhoods of my life, if I may say such a thing about a mentor.
S: What were your first thoughts when Jim Houghton approached
you about becoming a Residency Five playwright?
QAH: To be a part of Jim’s final year [at Signature] is particularly meaningful. Those $25 tickets are a gift. And the spirit of playwrights past and present
bounces through the Signature walls. It’s moving to be part of that tradition.