Addiction and Recovery
A central element of the story revolves around an addiction recovery website created and administered by one of the characters, Odessa Ortiza. Two parallel storylines actually take place over the course of the play; one involving real world interrelationships and one involving online relationships. A unifying aspect that binds both parallel lines close together like a magnet is addiction and recovery. Every single major character is to one degree or another and in one aspects or another addicted to something. The divergence occurs within the polarity between positive and negative. The characters who gather online are dealing with distinctly negative characteristics of addiction while Aunt Ginny and Yaz trek on the other side. Yaz has been addicted to pursuing career and financial success while Aunt Ginny is an addicted—in a manner of speaking—to benevolent acts of charity, cultural support and social protest. By the end, Yaz—realizing that her pursuit has left her empty—takes up the mantle of Aunt Ginny to the extent of basically asserting that she is the new sheriff in town.
The Shape of Water
As the title indicates, water is thematically significant to the story and its significance takes on many different shapes. Unifying the different shapes this thematic exploration takes, however, essentially boils down to one primary symbolic meaning: water is the giver—and consequently also potentially the taker—of life. The title derives from the recommended treatment to keep children from succumbing to the flu by carefully—ritualistically even—measuring out water in amounts large enough to throttle dehydration, but small enough to ensure their bodies don’t reject it. Odessa is at first totally committed to this potentially maddening rite, but inevitably her drug addiction takes over, she stops being such a stalwart and eventually her young daughter does succumb. Another example of the paradoxical relationship of water to survival involves the backstory of Chutes&Ladders who nearly drowns to death while swimming in the ocean under the influence. Saved from death by a lifeguard, the experience of nearly succumbing to too much water stimulates him to attend his first addiction recovery session in church the very next day. Throughout, water is demonstrated to be a life saver that takes on myriad shapes for different people.
Dissonance and Reconciliation
Adjunct professor Yaz is teaching music theory at the college and the lesson to which the audience is made privy revolves around the experimental and revolutionary jazz work of John Coltrane. Although she is speaking literally to her students about the music when she says it, her observation of Coltrane’s new free-form style of jazz applies to the interrelationships connecting at the crossroads of the narrative: “Dissonance is still a gateway to resolution.” This assertion applies in substantial amounts to the various personal problems creating dissonance in the relationships between the characters.
