Some plays are so good you can’t wait to talk about them, while others are so good you’re a little bit afraid to. "Water by the Spoonful," by award-winning playwright Quiara Hudes, is one of those latter ones. It’s a play so rich with ideas, and so generous of heart and spirit it won Hudes the Pulitzer in 2012, but as crafted, it also feels delicate and confessional, as if the audience is listening in on conversations we are not supposed to be hearing, witnessing the most painful and transformational moments in the lives of total strangers.

There is a sense of trespass in that, but also of privilege, and as

presented by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival - where I caught the

show in its final preview last weekend - that sense of privilege casts

a kind of spell that binds us together with these frail, fierce, funny and unforgettable people - and frankly, when the show was over, I didn’t want that spell to be broken by talking about it before those people had all settled in good and deep.

All due praise for that to director Shishir Kurup. The play, brilliantly written to begin with, absolutely thrives on Kurup’s tender

understanding of these characters, and his masterful grasp of the

playwright’s intentionally jazz-like rhythms and free-flowing tangents.

The second in a trilogy by Hudes, who also wrote the book for the Tony-winning musical "In the Heights," "Water By the Spoonful" begins with an emotionally stricken former Marine and part-time actor named Elliot, whose war-time encounters in Iraq still literally haunt him. The Puerto Rican aunt who raised him is dying of cancer in Philadelphia, just as Elliot is wrestling with a tempting job opportunity in Hollywood brought about by his music-professor cousin Yazmin. Silently suffering from acute PTSD, his family is the only thing keeping Elliot grounded, a truth he also uses to keep him from taking the risks he has to take if he ever wants to stop working at a sandwich shop.

Woven around Elliot’s journey is an ongoing online chat-room conversation between four recovering crack addicts, who we see

speaking aloud what they write to each other from different corners

of the world. Each character, with aliases like Orangutan, Chutes-

and-Ladders, HaikuMom and Fountainhead, speaks from his or her own spare, square slab on Sibyl Wickersheimer’s deviously simple set. Though separated by miles, writing from Japan, San Diego, and Philadelphia, the sense of community and connection formed by this

quarrelsome quartet of broken souls is evident, and it’s one of the

play’s most astonishing feats that a story about an online recovery

forum feels so intimate and dramatically pure.

The entire cast, lead by company regular Daniel Jose Molina - giving his hands-down best performance in three years at OSF - is sensational across the board. These are complicated people, and

Hudes offers no easy answers for any of them, nor much suggestion

that their futures, clean or not, using or not, will be easy. Especially

insightful is how the play illustrates the way an addict’s recovery,

often inspired by awareness of the pain they’ve caused their families, is most often thrown into jeopardy by the anger and dismissal of

those families.

That Elliot will turn out to be closely related to one of these struggling people is clear. But what happens to both of them after that is revealed is a complete suprise, in this gorgeously knotty, achingly tangled examination of the dehumanizing power of addiction, and of that discordant fusion of love, hatred, anger and forgiveness that some brave souls must struggle through while learning to be human again.

"Water by the Spoonful" runs through November at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. OSFAshland.org.