My Broken Language: A Play Based on Her Memoir

Quiara Alegría Hudes’ stage adaptation of her much-lauded memoir is a joyous celebration of Puerto Rican womanhood in 1990s West Philadelphia.

In this memoir-turned-play, Hudes showcases a handful of key life moments that mark subtle changes in her sense of self and her place in the world. Interlaid between these vignettes are moments of song, dance, and ritual that evoke her boisterous girlhood in a house run by the Perez women. Through this piece, we come to understand the collaborative art that was Hudes’s coming of age, and the communal nature of autobiography.

Quiara Alegría Hudes’s plays and musicals include Water by the Spoonful, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; In the Heights, winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical and a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, also a Pulitzer Prize finalist. They have been performed on and Off-Broadway and around the world.