Water By The Spoonful

The Ghost is a physical manifestation of Elliot’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from fighting in Iraq. The audience never learns who the Ghost represents or why the Ghost keeps asking for his passport back. The Ghost symbolizes the pain and trauma that haunts Elliot. Much like the Ghost, Elliot cannot avoid the source of his pain. Each character has some type of ghost, or pain from the past, haunting them. How they deal with their ghosts and move forward is at the forefront of the play’s conclusion. 

The chat room is a virtual space that offers genuine connection and intimacy. When characters enter the chat room, they are vulnerable and brutally honest with each other. They have a common struggle—the shared trauma of addiction—and they find the chat room a safe, supportive space in which to seek healing. Fountainhead initially disrupts the balance of the chat room, but it ultimately provides him a space to be honest with himself about his struggle with addiction. Other characters who do not struggle with addiction enter the chat room and struggle with the dissonance between the online world and the real world they know. At the end of the play, through Yaz taking over site administration while Odessa goes to rehab, the safe space of the chat room is allowed to persevere.