Often when I attend a play described as “avant-garde,” “experimental,” or “downtown,” unease grips my body as I remember the blank stares I gave my grad school professors as they effortlessly unraveled the layers of plays like Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro or Des McAnuff’s Leave It to Beaver is Dead. Even ten years and two degrees later, these creeping feelings of intellectual inadequacy followed me into Soho Rep’s Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, a collaboration between Loisaida queen Alina Troyano (a.k.a Carmelita Tropicana) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The marketing for the production, Soho Rep’s final in their Walker Street space, described the show as “an intergenerational debate about the ‘legacy’ of downtown New York…” Soho Rep’s imminent move uptown, the recent changes (or end) to decades-long downtown theaters, and aging prominent figures from the heyday of “the scene,” led me to think that what awaited might be a dirge for experimental theater in Lower Manhattan.
Instead, I was treated to slapstick metaphysical hijinks through an imaginative wonderland inhabited by a greatest hits of Alina Troyano’s creations. This was a world created by a near-unending cascade of curtains, a set that looked like it was held together by tape, plungers, shadow puppets, and a universe-opening bust of 17th century playwright Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In short, Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! represented the kind of love letter that embraced downtown theater’s boundary-pushing legacy as well as its penchant for low-budget, scrappy, sometimes less-than-serious dramatic experiments. The production quickly prompted me to take myself (and my studies) less seriously and simply enjoy the ride.
The play opens with Alina (playing herself) arriving at a law office. Before long, a stand-in for Branden (Ugo Chukwu) bursts in, arms full of designer shopping bags. The day before, Alina, once Branden’s teacher/mentor at NYU, called him with a shocking revelation—she was ready to kill (or retire) Carmelita Tropicana, the character/persona/icon that she’s been synonymous with for almost 40 years. Branden, with a little extra cash from a Broadway show (Appropriate) and television (FX’s Kindred), offered to buy the IP from his former teacher/mentor, instigating the present legal proceedings.
Before Branden and Alina finalize the deal, however, they rewind to tell the audience how we got here and what’s truly at stake. Much of the remaining action vacillates between the real world and Phantasmagoria, what a hyper-intelligent goldfish (you read that right) calls, a void where “anything any living human being has ever imagined” resides. Theater history nerds may be reminded of the 18th century horror performance form that involved using lamps to project shadow ghosts and ghouls. This corner of Phantasmagoria is inhabited by many of Alina’s ghosts: a cigar-chomping Cuban man, Pingalito; a cockroach, Martina; Hernán Cortés’ horse, Arriero; and a karaoke-singing plague pod of literary inspirations including María Irene Fornés, Walt Whitman, and Sor Juana. While Alina steps back into some of her roles (notably Pingalito) a versatile ensemble of Keren Lugo, Octavia Chavez-Richmond, and Will Dagger bring Phantasmagoria’s residents to life. However, conspicuously absent from the party is the titular Carmelita Tropicana. Feeling spurned by both Alina and Branden, the character/persona/icon takes control of Branden’s body in the real world. And it’s up to the two artists to quest through Phantasmagoria and find a way to stop Carmelita before it’s too late!
This theatrical buddy adventure keeps the play buoyant even when the creators flex their performance studies muscles. After all, Alina and Branden’s teacher/student relationship (both in the play and life) was formed in NYU’s performance studies department. In recounting their early days as teacher/student, Alina describes a performance where Branden slurps water from a fishbowl with a goldfish still inside. In her re-telling, Alina discusses how the performance challenged her comfort as audience/teacher in the face of the goldfish’s potential death. However, in Phantasmagoria the goldfish becomes both ever-growing threat and punchline, undercutting some of the profundity that Alina found in Branden’s initial performance.
Further both artists conjure the memory of scholar José Esteban Muñoz, whose chapter on Alina Troyano’s work in his book Disidentifications established her as “a pioneer in the aesthetics of disidentification.” While the play’s use of multiple Troyano personas evokes Muñoz’s analysis that her “roles, identifications, and routines compose Carmelita Tropicana’s hybrid self,” the play does not linger in the theoretical. Almost poking fun at the over-intellectualization of the kinds of art that has appeared downtown, the play moves with hot-mess velocity that undermines scholarly thought almost as soon as it points to theory. There’s time to re-read Disidentifications later. Right now, Alina and Branden must find Carmelita!
Despite this tongue-in-cheek, the play reveals the deep relationship between downtown theater and university classrooms. Scholars like Muñoz have not only built full studies around artists like Alina Troyano, but they’ve also created archives of their performances for future students to learn from well after their final bow. In the play, Branden quips that aside from “New Yorkers of a certain age,” most people learn about Carmelita Tropicana as students through the lens of Muñoz’s studies.
Branden’s line reminded me of playwrights like Kennedy and Fornés, whose bold works that premiered downtown are experienced more often in classrooms than seen onstage. I was further reminded of all those teachers who introduced me to these artists and challenged me to wrestle for deeper understandings of their plays, and more importantly, a broader sense of what theater can be. It was through these plays that my own imaginative abilities, my own contributions to Phantasmagoria, grew. Similarly, Alina and Branden muse on how writing prompts from Fornés were passed down to Alina, then to Branden, then to his students. It is partially through this continuum of teachers that Fornés’ work lives on to become new catalysts for students and their imaginations.
In this, the play offers a beautiful vision for New York’s experimental theater. Even as the rents get higher and more artists move elsewhere (even to Queens), the kinds of boundary-pushing art that found a home in Lower Manhattan over the last six decades will persist as long as there are teachers maintaining the legacy of their forebears in classrooms, instigating new artists to plumb the fringes of their own corners of Phantasmagoria and create goofy, scrappy, boundary-pushing, sometimes transcendent art.
After the play’s shenanigans, Alina Troyano and Carmelita Tropicana (spoiler alert) reunite. During the performance I saw, she returned full force with an over-the-top bedazzled brassiere and exaggerated Cuban accent. After some banter with the audience, she ended the show with a reading from Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia:
We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. 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.
Continuing the quotation, Muñoz argues that “Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present.”
In a time when the United States’ political present feels so dire, Carmelita Tropicana reminded us of the profound potentiality of the kinds of experimental works that pervaded Lower Manhattan for decades, specifically those created by queer artists of color. These experiments are often theatrical reaches toward more just, even utopian futures.
Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! — Soho Rep’s final production in their venue at 46 Walker Street — plays through December 15.
