With The Happiest Song Plays Last, playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes wraps up her Elliot trilogy, the three plays she wrote based loosely on the experiences of her cousin, Elliot, an Iraq War vet.
In a recent interview at OSF, Hudes talks about the arc of the trilogy, starting with the first play, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (which OSF did a reading of last season). “Elliot Ortiz begins as a teenager; a young man with a lot of potential,” Hudes says. “He has a real social brightness about him, an energy and enthusiasm about life and a willingness to work. He is not exactly a star student. He goes to a very poor public school in Philadelphia, so he graduates but doesn’t have a lot of options. He joins the Marines and is soon after sent to Iraq. The conflict begins as he goes to boot camp. That’s where we start with him.”
Hudes wrote Elliot as an independent play dealing with the problem of this teenage boy. She ended up happy with the work and wanted to continue exploring some of the ideas raised in it, to see what would happen as Elliot became a man. “As the new American coming-of-age tale, he was a Puerto Rican man in a diverse community, fighting our wars,” she says. “I came to realize this is both a contemporary and a classical story. Because he is one of a generation that has fought in the conflict in Iraq, I knew it would ultimately be a journey that involved much struggle, but I think it leads toward hope.”
Elliot, she says, doesn’t know what his future entails, but he wants it to entail something. “Does he want to become successful? Does he want to make money? Does he want to continue fighting in the war?”
In the second play, Water by the Spoonful, which OSF produced last year, Elliot has returned home from Iraq, injured and haunted by the ghost of a man he killed. Feeling stuck in his struggling Pittsburgh neighborhood, Elliot decides to go to L.A. to become an actor. His cousin, Yazmin, a music professor, takes the opposite path: She decides to return to their old neighborhood and see what it is like to be back home.
Catching up with the cousins
In the trilogy’s final play, The Happiest Song Plays Last, we see what has happened since they made these two very different life choices. Yazmin, caught between her intellectual career and her family roots, buys her late aunt Ginny’s house and becomes something of a matriarch for the community. She finds a way to integrate her two selves in a daily life that brings her great joy, companionship—and lots of cooking.
Meanwhile, Elliot becomes an actor in a documentary-style film being shot in Jordan that requires him to relive his combat experience on camera. He encounters danger, falls in love and comes into his own.
“By the end of The Happiest Song Plays Last, I think he has put his hat in the ring of adulthood,” Hudes says. “He has come to understand the ways he can be positive in the world as well as the kind of ghosts that haunt him that he has to accept and live with, but not surrender to, in his daily life.”
Hudes, who interviewed her cousin in the process of writing the plays, says how much he inspired her. At one point she asked if he would mind if she named the main character after him. His response? “I definitely would like that!”
“I gave the character a different last name just to make it clear that this is not a telling of my cousin’s life,” Hudes says. “In many ways, they are really close. What I was most drawn to was my cousin’s spirit—a bright, gifted, attractive, magnetic, positive person who has had so many obstacles to deal with. I find that compelling. Even though the facts have strayed in many different ways and the story isn’t literal, I do feel like there is a spirit there that connects them.”
Elliot has seen Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue and Water by the Spoonful, even an Armenian-language production of the latter that he traveled to Armenia to see in Hudes’ place. “In some ways, he is an ambassador for the play now, too,” she says, “and he feels that the play has put some important issues into the public sphere. He has expressed gratitude to me about doing that, even though at times it has been difficult. I am definitely dealing with some difficult issues, especially in the realm of what veterans go through in life.”
Hudes is not Yaz
If Elliot was modeled in part on Hudes’ cousin, Yaz was inspired by yet another cousin. “As this cousin went from being a young woman to a woman, she had to ask if she was going to become the family matriarch. The elder generation was dying and she was very closely connected to them, so she was the obvious inheritor of that throne. Doing that involves a level of personal sacrifice. I think her romantic relationships might have suffered, because she was the one who we all came to. Ultimately, she decided that she would do that, and that is what she has done with her life—she is the central matriarch of our family.”
Hudes, who is an American Revolutions-commissioned writer whose new play OSF looks forward to seeing here in Ashland in the future, has overcome numerous challenges in the course of writing this trilogy. At times she feared it wasn’t going to work.
“When I wrote the first draft of Water by the Spoonful as a commission for Hartford Stage, I told them, ‘We need to do a reading of this play and it needs to not have an audience, because I don’t know if the basic premise of the play even works as theatre. There are people in a chat room talking to each other and I have no idea if any of this even makes any sense.’ They said, ‘That’s silly. Let’s do it in front of an audience.’ So we did, and I really grew to love it, and it made me excited about continuing to write it.
“This is just about having a conversation; it’s no different,” she concludes. “It is terrifying to be a playwright. I feel, ‘Oh God, everything is going to crash and burn; nothing is going to work.’ Then a few things work and I feel a minor triumph.”
For more information about The Happiest Song Plays Last, click here.