After I walked into the Soho Rep on Wednesday, November 6, the day after the election, I wasn’t fully positive 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’ll present, I discover myself cautious of the platitudes that inform us artwork will one way or the other save us. I’ll grant that the humanities can contribute, however so many different very concrete issues must 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 primarily based in Decrease Manhattan that I can at all times belief to provide robust and provocative work. All through my almost 20 years in New York, I’ve been seeing their productions, however this might be the final time I’d get to look at one in every of their exhibits within the little black field theater in Tribeca the place they’ve been situated 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 area. Beginning in February 2025, they may start a residency of a minimum of two years within the 128-seat Sharp Theater at Playwright’s Horizons, which can almost double Soho Rep’s seating capability and convey their exhibits into a totally accessible area.
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 employees and skimming the books on supply — 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 speak in confidence 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 pressure 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 known as house. Troyano’s first full manufacturing that includes Carmelita Tropicana was Hen Sushi (1987), which she toured to quite a few areas in Germany and likewise carried out on the WOW Café Theatre in New York Metropolis, the area the place she first developed the character and located a creative house within the early Nineteen Eighties.
Carmelita is an exaggerated camp queer entertainer and Cubana residing within the Decrease East Facet. Via 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 identify she has typically used when educating, presenting at museums, publishing essays in tutorial journals, strolling down the road, and on and on. The result’s a built-in stress 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 generate profits. 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 continually 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 along 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 potential 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 develop into 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 area, and even appear to exit them fully at a couple of factors. The units change with the drawing of a curtain or the spin of a bit 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 transferring 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 turned a Tony and MacArthur Award-winning author, again when he thought he may observe 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 experience that I used to be grateful to be on that evening. At turns it asks what lineage may very well 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, significantly in the case of 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 manner that feels each strategic and instructive. To concurrently declare, break, and refuse identities is to pressure individuals to reckon along with your full humanity, whereas turning their needs and expectations of who you ought to be again on them. At a time when identity-based scapegoating is about to as soon as once more be the legislation of the land, it’s price all of us borrowing from Troyano/Carmelita’s playbook to show that impulse again on itself as typically as we probably 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.