“Plays that address the rapidly changing ways we communicate through digital devices” have become the focus of Springfield College theater in recent years, says the program’s director, Martin Shell. It all started two years ago with Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl, and continued last season with How to Survive the Grey Goo, a multimedia horror show that imagined a global cancer of self-replicating nanotechnology devouring the biosphere. Now Water by the Spoonful, by Quiara Alegreian Hudes, which premiered at Hartford Stage in 2012, introduces a quartet of ex-crack addicts using social media as an online support group. Their quest is interwoven with the continuing story of Elliot Ortiz, an Irag war vet struggling with the ghosts of his war experience. The texts that comprise much of the play’s, er, text are spoken by the characters “with the same occasional hyperbole and sudden confessional vulnerability that one ‘hears’ in online posts,” says Shell. As their physical world mingles and clashes with the online universe, “the need, the appetite for genuine physical presence and comforting touch build through the play.”
Nov. 13-16, Fuller Arts Center, Wilbraham Ave., Springfield College, $2-$5 at the door. 413-748-3443, springfieldcollege.edu/simpson.