13.+Hudes

//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 3 discussions ONLY.//
Anne Garcia-Romero (The University of California, Santa Barbara)

=Quiara Alegria Hudes's //Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue//=

Experimentation and Transculturation in //Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue// by Quiara Alegría Hudes

A tension can exist between theatrical experimentation and commercial viability. If a playwright writes a play which challenges traditional notions of structure, character and language, will her play get produced? If her play solely adheres to hegemonic, dramaturgical norms, is it more likely to get produced? Through examining //Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue// by Quiara Alegría Hudes, I propose that Hudes’ theatrical experimentation, created by exploring and subverting an existing artistic model, reflects the dynamics of transculturation and that the resulting play is not only commercially viable but vital to twenty-first century U.S. theater.

Hudes, a Yale-trained composer, utilizes compositional fugue structure in her play as she delves into the life of a Puerto Rican veteran from Philadelphia confronting a second tour of duty in Iraq. A fugue consists of a composition for multiple voices or instruments in which “a subject is stated unaccompanied in a single voice (or instrument). Then a second voice enters with the answer…The original voice continues with the counterpoint against the answer. After this a third voice enters in turn with the subject again while the first two voices continue with counterpoint against it. Finally, a fourth voice enters, now with the answer, while all three of the other voices accompany it with counterpoint.”1 The overall subject of Hudes’ play is Elliot’s military service in Iraq and the question of whether he’ll return for a second tour of duty. Hudes engages the repetition of the subject through delving into Elliot’s father’s, mother’s and grandfather’s military service in Vietnam and Korea.

In the description of the music in the play’s foreword, Hudes writes “Flute. Bach, danzónes, jazz, etudes, scales, hip-hop beats. Overlapping lines.”2 However, Hudes chooses a fugue to structure her play and not a danzón or other art form. By utilizing the fugue structure, Hudes sets up the expectation of a multi-vocal landscape which surrounds one main theme or idea. By extension, this implies a dynamic of constancy versus imitation or standard versus variation. Further, this also connotes a relation between hegemonic and subaltern. No matter how far the variation or repetition of the answer strays from the subject, it is always defined in light of the subject as the norm. Thus, Hudes could be stating that the impact of the subject of military service is all pervasive and regardless of generation or military conflict, the devastation of war is universal. However, also embedded in this play is the notion of the Ortiz family’s Puerto Rican culture versus their U.S. lives. The Puerto Rican culture takes a subaltern position, in counterpoint to the subject of the hegemonic U.S. culture which Elliot and his family embrace in their Philadelphia existence.

The counter-subject of a fugue occurs when “the material which accompanies the answer is used again against subsequent statements of either subject or answer.” 3 Hudes’ fugue model utilizes the character of Elliot’s mother, Ginny, to establish the counter-subject through the world of their garden in Philadelphia. Ginny, an Army nurse, created the private oasis a few months after her return from Vietnam in which she converted an abandoned lot into a lush garden reminiscent of Puerto Rico. This garden, the location of four prelude scenes, becomes a refuge for the Ortiz family where they can literally connect to their roots, reminding themselves who they are and where they come from. Thus leaving the garden means one is relegated to experience the harsh realities of war and/or a life in the U.S. which does not necessarily embrace the purity and beauty of the Ortiz family’s Puerto Rican culture.

With her play’s title, Hudes sets up the expectation that the play will contain a singular fugal construction. Yet in the play’s structure, Hudes doesn’t completely adhere to the fugue model. The play goes back and forth in time between scenes titled prelude and fugue. The four fugues reflect pivotal moments in Elliot’s military service and the preludes illuminate the influences on Elliot’s life before and after his first tour of duty. Nevertheless, by moving back and forth between prelude and fugue, the complexity of a fugue is not fully developed. Hudes doesn’t fully delve into the reverberations of Elliot’s military service and the physical and psychological impact of war. While the spare poetic quality of the piece is impressive, the back and forth nature of the structure provides the audience with only brief, albeit harrowing, glimpses into Elliot’s military experiences, such as the recounting of Elliot’s war injury in Tikrit where his leg is badly damaged. However, Hudes does not provide a deeper view into the lasting impact of that wound in subsequent scenes, preferring to jump backward or forward in time.

In //The Archive and The Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas//, Diana Taylor argues that transculturation is a “shifting or circulating pattern of cultural transference. The measurable impact of the ‘major’ on the ‘minor’ can be a long time coming.”4 However, twenty-first century transculturation is not so much a circulating pattern as it is a dynamic organism which grows, breaks down, regenerates and becomes a new creation, discarding the binary of major and minor for a constellation of minors, each vying for supremacy but each co-existing simultaneously. When the organism breaks down, this often can more fully illuminate transcultural complexities in the process. Thus the breakdown of the fugue structure in Hudes’ play may indeed be the point. Hudes chooses a fugue, a Western European construct, to explore the military life of Elliot Ortiz. Perhaps Hudes does not construct one single flawless fugue for just as Elliot struggles between past and present, military duty and the lure of civilian life, national service and individual desire, U.S. culture and Puerto Rican culture, the fugue cannot fully express the transcultural dynamics of Elliot’s journey. Therefore, as Hudes closes her Pulitzer-nominated play with unresolved dangling fugal elements, perhaps this accurately echoes the complex unknown which Elliot must navigate as he embarks on his second tour of duty in Iraq.

1 Verrall, John. //Fugue and Invention in Theory and Practice//. (Palo Alto, Calif: Pacific Books, 1966) ix. 2 Hudes, Quiara. //Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue//. (New York City: Dramatists Play Service, 2007) 6. 3 Verrall 19. 4 Taylor, Diana. //The Archive and the Repertoire : Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas//. (Durham : Duke University Press, 2003) 108.