Once I walked into the Soho Rep on Wednesday, November 6, the day after the election, I wasn’t solely certain I used to be up for seeing a play. Whilst somebody whose life is wrapped up within the arts and who cares deeply for the which means and solace they will present, I discover myself cautious of the platitudes that inform us artwork will in some way save us. I’ll grant that the humanities can contribute, however so many different very concrete issues have to occur to ensure that us to cease destroying ourselves and the intertwined ecosystems we depend on for survival.
That mentioned, I do love Soho Rep, a small, virtually 50-year-old theater firm based mostly in Decrease Manhattan that I can at all times belief to supply robust and provocative work. All through my almost 20 years in New York, I’ve been seeing their productions, however this is able to be the final time I’d get to observe one among their exhibits within the little black field theater in Tribeca the place they’ve been positioned for over 30 years.
The present present, Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, written by Alina Troyano and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and directed by Eric Ting, would be the firm’s closing manufacturing in that house. Beginning in February 2025, they are going to start a residency of at the least two years within the 128-seat Sharp Theater at Playwright’s Horizons, which is able to almost double Soho Rep’s seating capability and convey their exhibits into a completely accessible house.
Manufacturing {photograph} of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! at Soho Rep, New York Metropolis. Left to proper: Will Dagger, Ugo Chukwu, Keren Lugo, and Alina Troyano
And so, after chatting with the front-of-house workers and browsing the books on provide — Soho Rep has additionally lengthy made some extent of placing theatrical and efficiency texts into print, no small feat for a US theater — I settled into my seat within the second row and tried to divulge heart’s contents to no matter was about to unfold.
For many who don’t know Carmelita Tropicana, she is the creation and alter-ego of Alina Troyano, a Cuban-born drive of nature in New York Metropolis’s avant-garde theater and efficiency world, and a fixture within the Decrease East Facet neighborhood she has lengthy referred to as residence. Troyano’s first full manufacturing that includes Carmelita Tropicana was Hen Sushi (1987), which she toured to quite a few places in Germany and likewise carried out on the WOW Café Theatre in New York Metropolis, the house the place she first developed the character and located a creative residence within the early Eighties.
Carmelita is an exaggerated camp queer entertainer and Cubana residing within the Decrease East Facet. By her performances, she expresses each critique of and love for the overlapping worlds she occupies. Notably Carmelita is deeply entwined with Troyano’s personal life and identification — some extent related to the play. Many individuals know Troyano primarily as Carmelita Tropicana, myself included. It’s the title she has typically used when instructing, presenting at museums, publishing essays in educational journals, strolling down the road, and on and on. The result’s a built-in rigidity between the 2 identities: The place does one begin and the opposite finish? Can they even be separated? And if that’s the case, how?
Manufacturing {photograph} of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! at Soho Rep, New York Metropolis. Left to proper: Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Karen Lugo, Ugo Chukwu, Alina Troyano, and Will Dagger
On the earth of the play, Troyano is engaged within the quintessentially American exercise of dreaming up new methods to earn money. She lands on the concept of promoting off the character/persona/mental property that’s Carmelita Tropicana. The explanations she wants the cash? Partly as a result of capitalism is failing us all, even because it always presents as the answer to that failure, and partly due to Troyano’s many years spent making theater and efficiency artwork (profession paths not identified for being profitable). She additionally serves because the superintendent within the constructing she co-owns together with her sister and frequent inventive collaborator, filmmaker Ela Troyano, however this line of labor additionally hasn’t made her wealthy. Troyano manages to discover a attainable purchaser for Carmelita within the type of her former pupil, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (performed by actor Ugo Chukwu).
From this opening premise, the play explodes. At numerous moments Troyano and the character of Jacobs-Jenkins grow to be inhabited or possessed by Carmelita. Different characters Troyano created in her previous work additionally enter the world of the play, we journey throughout time and house, and even appear to exit them solely at just a few factors. The units change with the drawing of a curtain or the spin of a chunk of surroundings: We transfer from a bland workplace to a photographic facsimile of Troyano’s condo to a neon cavern manufactured from cardboard to a nightclub someplace in a mirage of Cuba — and at one level we discover ourselves nowhere in any respect, listening to a meandering and fairly shifting monologue by an ever-growing goldfish that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins as soon as utilized in a harrowing efficiency artwork piece throughout a category he took with Troyano/Carmelita, again earlier than he grew to become a Tony and MacArthur Award-winning author, again when he thought he may comply with in Troyano/Carmelita’s footsteps as a efficiency artist. Even the enduring Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, who was as soon as Troyano’s instructor, makes an look (performed by Octavia Chavez-Richmond).
Manufacturing {photograph} of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! at Soho Rep, New York Metropolis. Left to proper: Alina Troyano and Ugo Chukwu
The play is a typically poignant, gloriously absurd, uncontainable journey that I used to be grateful to be on that night time. At turns it asks what lineage might be, from inventive lineages to lineages for queer individuals who don’t procreate; what’s on the market; who will get entry to data and the way; who will get to say what, notably with regards to race and ethnicity; the what and why of theater; and, as is widespread in a lot of Troyano’s work, what’s this concept or mythology of the Latinidad all about, and what’s its utility.
Troyano has at all times pushed towards being contained, towards straightforward legibility, and in so doing, she refuses the sort of market and social enclosure for which identification markers are so typically used. This work with Jacobs-Jenkins carries that impulse into the current in a means that feels each strategic and instructive. To concurrently declare, break, and refuse identities is to drive individuals to reckon along with your full humanity, whereas turning their wishes and expectations of who you have to be again on them. At a time when identity-based scapegoating is about to as soon as once more be the regulation of the land, it’s value all of us borrowing from Troyano/Carmelita’s playbook to show that impulse again on itself as typically as we presumably can.
Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! continues at Soho Rep (46 Walker Avenue, Tribeca, Manhattan) by December 22. The present was written by Alina Troyano and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and directed by Eric Ting.
