Photo Flash: First Look at RLTP's WATER BY THE SPOONFUL

Road Less Traveled Productions (RLTP) will present the WNY premiere of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning (for Drama) Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes, opening Friday May 1st.The drama will star Anthony Alcocer, Monish Bhattacharyya, Rosa Fernandez, Jonathan Foreman, David Hayes, Sara Kow-Falcone and Victoria Pérez. Support for the production is sponsored by The Peter and Elizabeth C. Tower Foundation, Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria LLP, and Horizon Health Services.

Water by the Spoonful is set in two different worlds. The story begins with Elliot's story. A wounded Iraq war veteran Eliot Ortiz, living in Philadelphia and working in a sandwich shop, relies on painkillers to cope with a ghost he sees from his past, a ghost that pursues him and speaks to him in a language he does not understand. Meanwhile, he is supported by his patient and caring cousin, Yaz. When a family crisis upends the already precarious balance of Elliot's life, he is forced to confront his estranged biological mother: Odessa Ortiz, the woman otherwise known as "Haikumom".

The second world we are introduced to occurs online. "Orangutan" left Japan when she was nine days old but now, with tenuous sobriety, returns to meet her birth parents. She nurtures an online friendship with "Chutes&Ladders", an IRS paper-pusher who is "fifty years old on a good day" and doesn't dare to venture anywhere his 1995 Tercel can't take him. Newcomer "Fountainhead" comes off initially as a "troll"-a pretender who lurks the internet to harass the legit and the sincere; with only days clean, he's barely able to admit his addiction to himself, let alone his loving yet unstable wife. Site founder "Haikumom" moderates the conversation, making sure her online children play nice and keep their language clean. For "Haikumom", this chatroom is a safe haven far removed from the Real World, where she lives "one notch above squalor," her computer her only valued possession.

Regular performance times are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 7:30PM and Sunday at 2:00PM. Tickets are $35 general admission and $17 for students. Student tickets for Try-It Talkback Thursday performances are only $5 (with ID). Groups of 10 or more may apply for group discounts. Tickets can be ordered online atwww.roadlesstraveledproductions.org, by calling the RLTP Box Office at (716) 629-3069, or by visiting the Box Office during the 30 minutes prior to any performance. Reservations are suggested.

Photo Credit: © 2015 Mike Grantham