The Unicorn Theatre’s Water by the Spoonful goes down smooth

Freedom has a melody, and it sounds like jazz. That’s one takeaway from Water by the Spoonful, the Unicorn Theatre’s latest production and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. Spoonful is Hudes’ second play about the Puerto Rican-American Ortiz family, part of a trilogy that began with Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue. (The final play, The Happiest Song Plays Last, premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre last year.)

The script deftly weaves two storylines that seem, at first blush, unrelated. The first follows haunted veteran Elliot Ortiz (Keenan Ramos), an aspiring actor whose tour of duty in Iraq ended in injury and a day job slinging footlongs at Subway. His cousin Yazmin (Alisha Espinosa), a pragmatic music lecturer, tries to help him adjust to civilian life, but both are shaken by the loss of a beloved relative.

The second storyline takes place in a virtual world, where recovering crack addicts connect in a chat room. Led by amateur poet and maternal site administrator Haikumom (Dawnnie Mercado), three online friends swap sarcastic rants to cover the wounds from their own family dramas. Chutes&Ladders (Walter Coppage) has a grown son who won’t speak to him and grandchildren he has never met. Orangutan (Erika Crane Ricketts), an adoptee, travels to Japan on a desperate quest to hunt down her birth parents. And Fountainhead (Darren Kennedy), a newcomer to the chat room, refuses to tell his wife about his growing crack problem, earning the others’ ire with attempts to separate himself from addiction’s stain.

The stories strike a common chord when we learn that Haikumom is Elliot’s estranged IRL mom, Odessa. The play’s title comes from Elliot’s memory of her spooning water into his parched throat as a child, an act of love that ended in tragedy.

Dramatizing online conversations is a challenge, but it works here thanks to smart staging by director Mark Robbins, who avoids hiding actors behind computers and instead animates the chat-room scenes with livelier stage business and conversational quirks. We’re happy to suspend our disbelief: The play splices surreal, ethereal moments with the stuff of realist drama, a contrast that mostly works for the material.

It works for jazz, too, and the script leans heavily on that thematic parallel. Yazmin lectures about the beauty of free jazz to her students at Swarthmore College, playing clips from John Coltrane’s Ascension to impress on them the beauty of dissonance without resolution.

Act 1 ends with a theatrical analogue to Coltrane’s frenetic lines. Actors crowd the stage, layering fractured monologues over the percussive backbeat of Elliot’s blows on a punching bag, and the Unicorn’s talented performers make music from the mess.

Coppage is one of Kansas City’s finest actors, and his performance as the cuddly, “Corgi”-faced IRS agent Chutes&Ladders is no exception. His scenes with Unicorn newcomer Ricketts are some of the show’s most poignant.

Ramos looks just as comfortable onstage, turning in a vibrant, nuanced performance as Elliot. His venom-laced attacks on Odessa sound as natural to his voice as his gentle kidding with his cousin, Yazmin.

As Odessa, Mercado makes a strong impression in her first appearance at the Unicorn, mastering addiction’s highs and lows. Kennedy inhabits Fountainhead with revealing physical tics, finding tenderness in his Randian soul, and Espinosa is believable as brisk, self-assured Yazmin, though her performance can feel at times stiff.

Multiple characters and settings can pose challenges, but scenic designer Gary Mosby masters the task with a simple set textured with geometric designs. Asymmetrical slashes break the not-so-green-screen backdrop into interesting patterns as it’s transformed into various interiors by Douglas Macur and Jeff Cady’s handsome projections.

Sound designer David Kiehl amps up the play’s surreal elements with echo effects and water droplets, but his scene-transition music pounces on us a bit too aggressively, jarring us out of gentle moments with Coltrane’s brash, wandering notes. To Kiehl’s credit, Hudes calls for a Coltrane soundtrack in the script, but playwrights — even Pulitzer Prize-winning ones — don’t always make good directors.

And audiences might find the play’s looser, jazzier structure frustrating, as characters and storylines weave in and out like Coltrane’s sax. We never stay in one place for long, and the constraints of the chat room mean that actors are more often in monologues than interactions. Hudes seems aware of these challenges, coding a defense into Yazmin’s lecture: “Freedom,” she warns her students, “is a hard thing to express musically without spinning into noise.”

But if the script errs, it does so on the side of caution. The play feels weighed down by too many endings, too many attempts to structure the noise: a eulogy, a pilgrimage to Puerto Rico to scatter the ashes, monologues that draft blueprints for each character’s future. Spoonful resolves tidily, when a discordant note might ring truer.

Still, the Unicorn finds enough music in the lines to keep us listening. Coltrane was content with chaos. Hudes isn’t, but her script sings all the same.