Review: Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, a Fantastic Journey to a Bygone New York

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I had never heard of Carmelita Tropicana, the downtown performance artist and subject of the new fantasy-adventure play Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, now at Soho Rep. I hadn’t moved to New York when she won her Obie Award for sustained excellence in 1999. I arrived five years later, and mostly experienced downtown during the golden age of burlesque, with stars like Darlinda Just Darlinda, Tigger, and Murray Hill (one of the few performers to play a central role in successive generations of New York nightlife).

New York is a town where you will discover your favorite restaurant, bookstore, and avant-garde performance space — only to watch them all disappear within a decade, leaving you feeling like an outsider all over again. That brutal dynamism powers the heartbreak that hums beneath this joyously imaginative tribute to weird theater and the people who make it.

The play is co-written by Alina Troyano (who has been performing as Carmelita Tropicana for the past four decades) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who was her student at NYU and this year won a Tony Award for Appropriate. It is premised on an attempt by Jacobs-Jenkins (Ugo Chukwu) to buy Carmelita as a piece of intellectual property when Troyano (playing herself) threatens to retire her as a character. But Carmelita has her own plans, which transport Jacobs-Jenkins and Troyano from a cramped law office conference room to Phantasmagoria, an alternate plane where all Troyano’s characters live.

There’s bus philosopher Pingalito (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Hernan Cortes’s pacifist horse Arriero (Will Dagger), and buxom cucaracha Martina (Keren Lugo). Alina and Branden also discover María Irene Fornés (Chavez-Richmond) sheltering in a quarantine pod with Walt Whitman (Dagger) and Juana Inés de la Cruz (Lugo). They will need to work together to return to the real world, where Carmelita has hijacked Branden’s body (“my Black body,” he says with indignation) and plans to use it as a vehicle for her career ambitions. It’s The Neverending Story for experimental theater nerds, with a touch of Freaky Friday.

Director Eric Ting stuffs more dimension shifts onto the tiny stage of the Soho Rep than a Marvel movie, facilitated by a shab-fab set of curtains and backdrops (design by Mimi Lien and Tatiana Kahvegian) and Barbara Samuels’s low-tech sci-fi lighting. Greg Corbino supercharges the ridiculousness with his costumes (Whitman in Daisy Dukes), but his puppets really make this feel like an old-fashioned downtown extravaganza.

Throughout the play, Branden is stalked by a goldfish (Dagger manipulating an array of puppets) that he nearly killed in Alina’s class while performing a piece about water privatization. Liberated from its tiny fishbowl, it grows ever larger. “I’m really happy for your success or whatever but you didn’t get where you are by yourself, you know,” it says when finally face-to-gill with Branden, every syllable dripping with professional jealousy. Dagger fully commits to the intensity of the beat, which makes it even more hilarious.

Dagger, Lugo, and Chavez-Richmond all take on multiple roles with the zest of children playing dress-up. Chukwu deftly toggles between realism and caricature in his portrayal of Jacobs-Jenkins, winkingly inviting us into this world of unreliable narrators and changing camera angles. And Troyano reintroduces the audience (or, if you’re like me, introduces us for the first time) to Carmelita Tropicana, a genuine figure of joyfully transgressive creativity that could only be born in the New York of the late 20^th century.

But is that true of the city anymore? In a late monologue, Branden reminisces on his “salad days” attending weird off-off-off-Broadway theater in which not-very-good singers and not-particularly-gifted dancers came together to re-create music videos onstage. “Yes, a lot of it was,” he searches for a delicate word before giving up, “excruciating, but some of that theatre was actually quite transcendent. Genuinely surprising. Occasionally mind altering.” This theater wasn’t about a very important issue — and that was OK.

While I typically groan at such theses-as-monologues, this one spoke to something I think about a lot, which is the nagging suspicion that New York is no longer a haven for boundary-breaking artists. I worry that in 2024, they have all decamped to Nashville and Austin, leaving us with the trust-fund Beckys and finance Chads — and incumbent MacArthur genius playwrights. There’s just so long that New York can trade on its past glories which, like Carmelita Tropicana, are unlikely to be wrapped into the Disney IP empire anytime soon.