SOUL SACRIFICE

A 9-year-old Mexican American begins her journey towards adulthood in Boyle Heights circa 1970 in Consuelo G. Flores’s powerful autobiographical family drama Soul Sacrifice, a solid CASA 0101 World Premiere production that would be even better with a child actress in its leading role.

Twenty-five years have passed since that fateful summer of ’70 and the Flores family now find themselves reunited in the Boyle Heights house that some of them still call home, drawn back together in mourning.

It doesn’t take long for memories to take over as the youngest of the four Flores siblings, Connie (Myrna Velasco), the only one to have been born in the United States, takes us back in time to the day that the family’s eldest, Luie (Carlos Pratts), goes in for the last of a series of tests required for draftees into the U.S. Army as America wages war in a faraway country called Vietnam.

Patriarch Jose (Martin Morales) reacts with macho pride upon learning that his son will be serving his country, Luie’s mother Guadalupe (Karla Ojeda) lights a votive candle to St. Jude to pray for her son’s safety, elder daughter Rachel (Itzel Ocampo) is doubly concerned because her sweetheart Victor has also been drafted, destination Vietnam, and high schooler Ben (David Flores) heads off to join an antiwar protest march.

Only nine-year-old Connie is too young to understand what’s going on around her in the Flores home, and it’s through her eyes that we see events unfold much as we did via Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird when Tom Robinson stood trial for rape in racist Alabama.

And if things weren’t already confusing for a preteen, they get even more so on August 29 when Connie tags along with her older siblings to a massive antiwar protest down Whittier Blvd. that turns violent when police attack peaceful marchers with tear gas and real-life LA Times reporter Rubén Salazar is killed by a police officer in the melee.

If nothing else, Soul Survivor provides a crash course for younger audience members in what it was like to live at a time when a war was being fought not by a volunteer army but by teenagers sent thousands of miles away, often against their volition, to the jungles of Southeast Asia only to be sent home in body bags too often filled with black or brown “casualties of war.”

And if more recent conflicts have seen Americans becoming aware of how wartime trauma can cause PTSD, such was not the case back when fathers like Jose expected their returning sons to simply man up and mothers like Guadalupe were convinced that prayer was the solution to their sons’ mental health issues.

All of this adds up to some powerful theater at CASA 0101, with director Kenneth Castillo eliciting deeply felt performances from his entire cast, in particular from a devastatingly powerful Pratts, though Morales’s heavy-drinking Jose, Ojeda’s deeply devout Guadalupe, Ocampo’s nurturing Rachel, Flores’s firebrand Ben, and Velasco’s sweet and spunky Connie all earn deserved curtain call applause.

That being said, I can’t help wishing that the role of 9-year-old Connie had been entrusted to one (or perhaps an alternating two) of L.A.’s many talented young child actresses because no matter how hard the lovely and talented Velasco tries, the effect of an adult pretending to be a child is nowhere near as powerful as it would be if there were no pretense involved.

CASA 0101 has given Soul Sacrifice a topnotch production design beginning with Audrey Szot’s colorful replica of Flores’s childhood home while Patricia (Mama J) Tripp’s costumes evoke the early 1970s Boyle Heights-style as does Angela Ornelas’s sound design, and Alex Parra’s lighting ranges effectively from subtle to dramatic, with props manager Maia Melendez and projection designer Miguel Delgado completing the topnotch team.

Soul Sacrifice is produced by Emmanuel Deleage. Ornelas is stage manager and Jazmin Jimenez is assistant stage manager. Al Aguilar is production assistant. Steve Moyer is publicist.

It’s been over five decades since 9-year-old Consuelo “Connie” Flores experienced the events depicted in Soul Sacrifice, but her memories add up to a powerful reminder of how things were back when America waged war in Vietnam, especially for the Latino community. For that reason alone, it’s worth paying CASA 0101 a visit.

CASA 0101 Theatre, 2009 E. 1st Street, Los Angeles. Through June 21. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00. Sundays at 3:00.
www.casa0101.org

–Steven Stanley
May 30, 2026
Photos: Steve Moyer

Visit www.theatreinla.com/nowplayingrs.php for a review roundup of what’s now playing in theaters around Los Angeles.

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