When you hear the phrase “downtown theater,” perhaps some images or memories come to mind–something weird, nonlinear, probably low-budget, maybe devised, something you’d call “experimental.” Perhaps that memory is of something at Soho Rep, beloved off-Broadway theater that, since the 80s, has been a home for the avant-garde. After many years, Soho Rep is leaving its iconic tenancy at 46 Walker Street. For a fitting finale–at least for this chapter–the last play at this location is Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, co-written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Alina Troyano.
The pairing feels poetic and true to form for Troyano and Jacobs-Jenkins, both of whom are known to write themselves as characters into their work in various capacities. Jacobs-Jenkins performed in and (separately) wrote himself (“BJJ”) into his play An Octoroon, which, of course, premiered at Soho Rep. Troyana is a local legend of the performance art world, adored by theater historians, queer theorists, and drama professors, most famous for her persona Carmelita Tropicana. However, as the play begins, we learn that after years of performing as (and teaching as) Carmelita, she is thinking of killing her off; in a twist, Jacobs-Jenkins, her former star pupil, offers to buy her.
Quickly the real blends with the artistic: an actor (Ugo Chukwu) plays Jacobs-Jenkins, but Troyano plays herself. What was maybe a real conversation and consideration for the two becomes fodder for a drama that goes from realist play about the legalities of “living IP” to a fantastical picaresque that takes us in and out of Troyana’s “phantasmagoria,” the imagined space where she stores her various performance personae.
If you are feeling lost or overwhelmed at all of this, know that I have only skimmed the surface. In many ways, Give Me Carmelia Tropicana! resists form, easy categorization, classical rules of plot and, well, reality. Jacobs-Jenkins and Troyano quite literally take us on a journey, and all you can do is hold on and try to enjoy the ride. Asking questions or looking for logic won’t get you far.
Once/if you are able to resist the impulse for clarity, you can get at the deeper themes of the work. Over the course of the piece, we watch Troyano work through her relationship to Carmelita and her former work, wondering if that era is over, how or when to move on, what a responsible stewardship of her living archive might look like, and if she is indeed ready to let go.
While these questions are all specific to Troyano, they have strong symbolic resonance with Soho Rep, which also is moving on in some ways, closing a chapter. Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! is a tidy way to look back and to reflect as they prepare to step forward, to cling with a fond nostalgia and reverence as they debate what exactly will come next. Just as we can easily make the leap from Troyano to Soho Rep, the play, especially in a final monologue from Jacobs-Jenkins, invites us to consider downtown experimental theater more broadly. Is its moment also ending? Are we entering a new era, where the majority of high-profile off-Broadway theater is happening mere blocks away from Broadway–and does this geographic shift uptown come with a shedding of the avant-garde and a move towards more commercial, easily digestible theater?
In this soliloquy, he describes the many downtown shows he watched when he was younger: “There was a lot of energy and ideas and ingenuity and curiosity and wonder and interesting failure…And yes, a lot of it was excruciating, but some of the theatre was actually quite transcendent. Genuinely surprising. Occasionally mind altering.” He ends by asking not if there are still theatermakers out there “experimenting” in such a fashion, but where they are doing this work. A thought-provoking question that, like many of the questions raised in this piece, he does not answer.
This metatheatrical monologue is a bit like cheating, an apologia that would’ve been more effective had it not been stated so explicitly. Like some of the work he remembers, Give Me Carmelia Tropicana! is a wildly ambitious work, an intriguing endeavor, though not always successful per se. At times director Eric Ting (who is also a director of Soho Rep) cannot manage to wrangle in the various creative forces overflowing, and several moments could have been edited, refined, or polished. But then again, maybe it wouldn’t feel very downtown if they were.
Throughout the play, a goldfish (played by Will Dagger, puppet designs by Greg Corbino), gradually expands in size and sentience, telling the audience that goldfish grow in proportion to their captivity. In a fishbowl, they are a couple inches; in the wild, they can get up to nineteen. Like a goldfish, the avant-garde will grow to its environment, and will always find a space to inhabit.
Troyano, as Carmelita, ends each performance with an improvised monologue. I saw the piece only a few days after the presidential election, and she closed with the words of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz (who frequently wrote about Carmelita): “Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” These words clearly mean a great deal to Troyano (and also to me), and I hope we can find solace in Muñoz’s idea that even though the present may feel like a prison, we are not, and should not, be limited by it, and instead must imagine, search for, and travel toward better worlds–be they literal new homes, like for Soho Rep, or more speculative queer utopias. Regardless, we can go there together.
Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! — Soho Rep’s final production in their venue at 46 Walker Street — plays through December 15.
