The Happiest Song Plays Last 

Reviewed by Katie Buenneke
Latino Theatre Company
Through March 19 

The Happiest Song Plays Last is, as the title implies, the last play in the Elliot trilogy, three works by Quiara Alegría Hudes playing concurrently in Los Angeles.

The first two plays, Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue and Review: Water by the Spoonful, stand more or less independent of each other, especially since Elliot is more of a supporting character in the latter. By contrast, The Happiest Song Plays Last requires you to be familiar with Water by the Spoonful. Nearly everything that happens to Elliot here is set up in the previous play.

The Happiest Song Plays Last follows Elliot (Peter Pasco) as he films a war movie in Jordan. Initially hired as a consultant, Elliot has stepped into the lead role, since the director and star (who are never seen in the play) do not get along. The Arab Spring is launching just two countries away, and a restless Elliot wants to see what’s going on in Egypt. Meanwhile, his cousin Yaz (Elisa Bocanegra), who’d bought Elliot’s mother’s house after she passed away, is gardening, cooking for the community, and dealing with her feelings for her older married friend Agustín (Al Rodrigo), who wants to have children with her.

This is the only play in the trilogy that doesn’t feature a character who expounds on a style of music, revealing how that style informs the structure of the play at hand. Perhaps Hudes assumes that everyone is familiar with happy songs, but there’s hardly a sense of unmitigated joy here. While the ending resolves more or less happily, there’s plenty of sorrow and fear along the way, as Elliot tries to avoid his unresolved guilt over his actions as a soldier in Iraq, and Yaz faces unending difficulties back home in Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, the play suffers both in concept and execution. Compared to the first two more elegantly constructed works, The Happiest Song Plays Last feels haphazardly slapped together. The scenes are disjointed both internally and contextually; characters bring up too many topics out of the blue, and the intercutting narratives don’t mesh well together.

These difficulties are only compounded by the performances under the direction of Edward Torres. The acting, across the board, is not good — by turns, overwrought, flat and, in the cases of Ali (Kamal Marayati), an Iraqi friend of Elliot’s, and Lefty (John Seda-Pitre), a homeless friend of Yaz’s, verging on insensitive caricature. The cast also had some issues with the text, tripping over their words and flubbing lines throughout the play.

Pasco and Bocanegra’s interpretations of Elliot and Yaz are quite different from those of Sean Caravajal and Keren Lugo, respectively, in Water by the Spoonful.  And Caravajal and Pasco’s takes on Elliot are entirely different from that of Peter Mendoza’s in Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue. Naturally, every actor brings something different to his or her character, but in this case the interpretations vary so much from production to production that the characters are nearly unrecognizable. The one common thread across all three is the scenic design; Sibyl Wickersheimer (at the Douglas), Adam Riggs (at the Taper), and Se Hyon Oh (at LATC) create a coherent sense of continuity with their sets, with lots of negative space and an interplay between greenery and dirt.

The Happiest Song Plays Last should be a triumphant ending to the Elliot trilogy — a beautiful major chord that resolves all the storylines throughout all three plays. Instead, it’s an unsatisfying limp to the finish line.

Latino Theatre Company, 514 S. Spring St., downtown; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m;, Sun., 3 p.m.; Mon., 7:30 p.m.; through Mar 19. Thelatc.org. Running time: two hours and 10 minutes with a 20-minute intermission.