Review: ‘Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!’ Is A Crazy Avant-Garde Flashback

11.11.2024 17:00

New York Observer

I have little appetite to spend the next four years gloomily referencing current events in my reviews, so let’s get this out of the way. It was a massive relief to spend an evening soon after the Presidential election in a different era. Not necessarily a more innocent time, just one where artistic risk was the norm, and cultural production was not impoverished by AI, IP, or social media. The period? Could be the 1980s or ’90s, when downtown performance art was in high ferment. Or maybe it’s 2007, when theater kid Branden Jacobs-Jenkins took Alina Troyano’s NYU class. Troyano’s outrageous, longtime alter ego is Carmelita Tropicana, a Carmen Miranda-like gender satirist and social critic prone to wearing campy, trash-glam outfits and barking rapidly in a thick Cuban accent. Through Troyano, Jacobs-Jenkins became smitten with the romance of the old East Village, its anarchy, its queer aesthetic freedom. However, life would take him from performance art to being one of his generation’s most celebrated playwrights (e.g., Appropriate). The endearingly loony Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! represents the fusion of Troyano’s decades-long practice, and Jacobs-Jenkins’s vicarious nostalgia for his mentor’s world.

The two are co-authors of the absurdist comedy, which happens to be the final production to run at Soho Rep, founded 49 years ago. Lots of memories are churning through theater geek heads at 46 Walker Street. Personally, I reeled in the years (25 of them) thinking about the Richard Maxwell show I did there, Cowboys & Indians, in which I adopted a British accent and a robotic deadpan. Over the years I’ve had my mind routinely dismantled at Soho Rep: multiple neo-dadaist plays by Mac Wellman, Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, Melissa James Gibson’s [sic], Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Public Obscenities, and Jacobs-Jenkins’s own An Octoroon. The company has the ability to completely reinvent its space every time, magically endowing its black box with greater depth, or using its basement to evoke subterranean dimensions under our seats.

This polymorphous production—directed with frisky panache by Eric Ting—is no different. The scenic design is by Mimi Lien, an old hand at crafting physical environments that keep shifting and unfolding before our eyes. Here Lien (and co-designer Tatiana Kahvegian) takes us from a sterile, gray lawyer’s office to an eclectically furnished East Village loft and finally, a candy-colored land called Phantasmagoria, where cockroaches and mice have love affairs and Troyano’s literary influences spend pandemic lockdown together.

I’m not entirely sure that recounting the hallucinogenic plot would ruin its goofy randomness. We open with a meeting between Branden (Ugo Chukwu) Alina (Troyano herself) with their respective lawyers (Will Dagger and Keren Lugo) brandishing contracts. Alina is there to sign over intellectual-property rights over Carmelita Tropicana to Branden. She, in a depressed funk, has decided to “kill” her creation, and Branden thinks he can make a TV show out of her. Alina then abruptly breaks the fourth wall and proceeds to tells us how she got here. What follows in an extended flashback is the twisty tale of teacher-student rivalry, with Branden as the patronizing ex-pupil-made-good who views Alina with pity verging on ageist contempt. He blithely refers to Alina’s “dotage” and wonders if she might have early-onset dementia.

Determined to get the rights to Carmelita, Branden breaks into Alina’s house while she’s asleep and whispers in her ear, “Give me Carmelita Tropicana!” upon which she wakes and clocks him with a bust of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17^th century nun and poet. Branden wakes up in “Phantasmagoria”—a surreal realm where all of Alina’s characters live.

To make a long synopsis short, the spirit of Carmelita Tropicana possesses Branden’s body (shades of All of Me and Venom) and eventually, to exorcise the rogue fictive persona (who, after all, just wants to survive), Branden’s spirit must inhabit Alina’s body and that bust of Sor Juana will be a crucial tool to send Carmelita back to the land of make-believe. It’s complicated—deliciously so. There’s a goldfish from Branden’s past that he coughs up while in Phantasmagoria, which grows monstrously big throughout the course of the play (droll puppets by Greg Corbino). Dagger has a barnstormer of a monologue as the fish, which has achieved edgelord sentience and plans to wreak revenge on the world.

Ting and the playwrights are blessed by a very appealing, versatile cast. Chukwu is dryly hilarious and charming as the play’s straight man (so to speak); Lugo transforms elegantly from a femme cockroach to the butch Sor Juana; and secret weapon Octavia Chavez-Richmond is equally vivid as a male Cuban bus driver and, later, a sweetly wise María Irene Fornés (the late, great experimental playwright). And then, of course, there’s Troyano herself, a joyous imp who has infectious fun lampooning our present-day digital dystopia. To be honest, I’m both sick and scared of this world, in which attention is monetized and conformity incentivized. Carmelia Tropicana: Take us all to Phantasmagoria!