ALL FOR ONE

Quiara Alegria Hudes reinvents her memoir in My Broken Language.

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

One of my favorite moments in “My Broken Language”—written and directed by Quiara Alegría Hudes, at Signature Theatre’s Pershing Square Signature Center—comes when the femme performers of the play’s chorus walk in willowy patterns around the stage, each holding a book by a venerated writer. They lay the books on the ground and space them out precisely, forming a path. That image alone is enough to set forth the electric, often moving idea behind the play: that the arts we attend to—literary, religious, choreographic, conversational—are what, in the end, make us who we are and set us on our way. These books and their words are the substance of an unsettled soul, and have paved its road outward, into the world.

While the books are paraded, the performers call out the names of their authors: Allen Ginsberg, William Shakespeare, and Esmeralda Santiago are mentioned. (I glimpsed one of my own long-loved books, Santiago’s “When I Was Puerto Rican,” just before it got placed on the ground.) “Where would I be without ‘The House on Mango Street’?” somebody asks, referencing Sandra Cisneros’s classic coming-of-age novel.

In Cisneros’s recent poem “Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982,” published in this magazine, she describes growing up— her constant subject—on the raucous, energetic dance floors of that summer resort town:

We were all on the run in ’82. Jumping to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” the summer’s theme song. Beat thumping in our blood. Drinks sweeter than bodies convulsing on the floor.