This article discusses the overlapping relationship between setting diversification and character creation as experimented by Puerto Rican American playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes (1977–) in her metatheatrical drama Water by the Spoonful (2011). The play, which emerges in a second chronological order in Hudes’s so-called Elliot Trilogy, presents diasporic characters of different ethnicities and mixed cultural backgrounds as operating interactively within three different, though intersecting, realms or spaces: the real world, virtual cyberspace, and metaphysical space. The real world of the play features interacting Puerto Rican Americans, Japanese Americans, African Americans, and White Americans in a way that highlights their ethnocultural diversity in real American, Puerto Rican, and Japanese settings. Some of these binational, bilingual, and bicultural characters, who belong to different generations (20 s, 30 s, 40 s, 50 s), also occupy, and actually favor, the virtual realm or cyberspace of the internet where they assume unreal identities but negotiate real issues spurred by real life circumstances and reveal secrets about themselves and their families through online group therapy sessions. The metaphysical space is used as a magical realist element and is exclusively reserved by Hudes for exposing her Puerto Rican American characters’ restless spiritual and mental struggle with the obsessive feelings of nostalgia, homesickness, regret, and displacement. The three realms or spaces intersect and collide in a way that determines the social attitudes and psychological moods of diasporic characters.

本文讨论了波多黎各裔美国剧作家 Quiara Alegría Hudes（1977-）在她的元戏剧剧《一匙一勺的水》（2011 年）中所尝试的场景多元化和角色创作之间的重叠关系。该剧按照胡德所谓的艾略特三部曲的第二个时间顺序出现，呈现了不同种族和混合文化背景的离散人物在三个不同但交叉的领域或空间中互动运作：现实世界、虚拟网络空间和虚拟世界。形而上的空间。该剧的现实世界以波多黎各裔美国人、日裔美国人、非裔美国人和美国白人的互动为特色，突出了他们在真实的美国、波多黎各和日本环境中的民族文化多样性。其中一些属于不同世代（20 多岁、30 多岁、40 多岁、50 多岁）的双重国籍、双语和双文化人物也占据并实际上青睐互联网的虚拟领域或网络空间，他们在那里假设不真实的身份但可以通过在线团体治疗课程来协商由现实生活环境引发的实际问题，并透露有关自己及其家人的秘密。形而上的空间被用作魔幻现实主义元素，是胡德斯专门保留的，用于揭露她笔下的波多黎各裔美国人角色与怀旧、思乡、遗憾和流离失所的强迫情感之间的不安的精神和心理斗争。这三个领域或空间的交叉和碰撞决定了流散人物的社会态度和心理情绪。