When I walked into the Soho Rep on Wednesday, November 6, the day after the election, I wasn’t entirely sure I was up for seeing a play. Even as someone whose life is wrapped up in the arts and who cares deeply for the meaning and solace they can provide, I find myself wary of the platitudes that tell us art will somehow save us. I’ll grant that the arts can contribute, but so many other very concrete things need to happen in order for us to stop destroying ourselves and the intertwined ecosystems we rely on for survival.
That said, I do love Soho Rep, a small, almost 50-year-old theater company based in Lower Manhattan that I can always trust to produce strong and provocative work. Throughout my nearly two decades in New York, I’ve been seeing their productions, but this would be the last time I’d get to watch one of their shows in the little black box theater in Tribeca where they’ve been located for over 30 years.
The current show, Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, written by Alina Troyano and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and directed by Eric Ting, will be the company’s final production in that space. Starting in February 2025, they will begin a residency of at least two years in the 128-seat Sharp Theater at Playwright’s Horizons, which will nearly double Soho Rep’s seating capacity and bring their shows into a fully accessible space.
And so, after chatting with the front-of-house staff and perusing the books on offer — Soho Rep has also long made a point of putting theatrical and performance texts into print, no small feat for a US theater — I settled into my seat in the second row and tried to open up to whatever was about to unfold.
For those who don’t know Carmelita Tropicana, she is the creation and alter-ego of Alina Troyano, a Cuban-born force of nature in New York City’s avant-garde theater and performance world, and a fixture in the Lower East Side neighborhood she has long called home. Troyano’s first full production featuring Carmelita Tropicana was Chicken Sushi (1987), which she toured to numerous locations in Germany and also performed at the WOW Café Theatre in New York City, the space where she first developed the character and found an artistic home in the early 1980s.
Carmelita is an exaggerated camp queer entertainer and Cubana living in the Lower East Side. Through her performances, she expresses both critique of and love for the overlapping worlds she occupies. Notably Carmelita is deeply entwined with Troyano’s own life and identity — a point relevant to the play. Many people know Troyano primarily as Carmelita Tropicana, myself included. It’s the name she has often used when teaching, presenting at museums, publishing essays in academic journals, walking down the street, and on and on. The result is a built-in tension between the two identities: Where does one start and the other end? Can they even be separated? And if so, how?
In the world of the play, Troyano is engaged in the quintessentially American activity of dreaming up new ways to make money. She lands on the idea of selling off the character/persona/intellectual property that is Carmelita Tropicana. The reasons she needs the money? Partly because capitalism is failing us all, even as it constantly presents as the solution to that failure, and partly because of Troyano’s decades spent making theater and performance art (career paths not known for being lucrative). She also serves as the superintendent in the building she co-owns with her sister and frequent artistic collaborator, filmmaker Ela Troyano, but this line of work also hasn’t made her rich. Troyano manages to find a possible buyer for Carmelita in the form of her former student, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (played by actor Ugo Chukwu).
From this opening premise, the play explodes. At various moments Troyano and the character of Jacobs-Jenkins become inhabited or possessed by Carmelita. Other characters Troyano created in her past work also enter the world of the play, we travel across time and space, and even seem to exit them entirely at a few points. The sets change with the drawing of a curtain or the spin of a piece of scenery: We move from a bland office to a photographic facsimile of Troyano’s apartment to a neon cavern made of cardboard to a nightclub somewhere in a mirage of Cuba — and at one point we find ourselves nowhere at all, listening to a meandering and quite moving monologue by an ever-growing goldfish that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins once used in a harrowing performance art piece during a class he took with Troyano/Carmelita, back before he became a Tony and MacArthur Award-winning writer, back when he thought he might follow in Troyano/Carmelita’s footsteps as a performance artist. Even the iconic Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, who was once Troyano’s teacher, makes an appearance (played by Octavia Chavez-Richmond).
The play is a sometimes poignant, gloriously absurd, uncontainable ride that I was grateful to be on that night. At turns it asks what lineage could be, from artistic lineages to lineages for queer people who don’t procreate; what’s for sale; who gets access to information and how; who gets to say what, particularly when it comes to race and ethnicity; the what and why of theater; and, as is common in much of Troyano’s work, what is this idea or mythology of the Latinidad all about, and what is its utility.
Troyano has always pushed against being contained, against easy legibility, and in so doing, she refuses the kind of market and social enclosure for which identity markers are so often used. This work with Jacobs-Jenkins carries that impulse into the present in a way that feels both strategic and instructive. To simultaneously claim, break, and refuse identities is to force people to reckon with your full humanity, while turning their desires and expectations of who you should be back on them. At a time when identity-based scapegoating is about to once again be the law of the land, it’s worth all of us borrowing from Troyano/Carmelita’s playbook to turn that impulse back on itself as often as we possibly can.
Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! continues at Soho Rep (46 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through December 22. The show was written by Alina Troyano and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and directed by Eric Ting.
