If you haven’t spent much time in the indie theater scene — not just Off Broadway locations or even Off Off Broadway venues — then you’re liable to be puzzled or even frustrated by Give Me Carmelita Tropicana, a new collaboration by Tony winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate) and his former NYU professor Alina Troyano. The show, which opened Sunday at the Soho Rep, revels in all of the elements of the downtown avant-garde theater scene that Troyano helped to establish and influence in the 1980s and ’90s, particularly under her outrageously outré alter-ego persona, Carmelita Tropicana.
Much of that DIY approach to theater-making has now decamped to Brooklyn patios and Washington Heights apartments — but the aesthetic had a memorable run in black-box spaces like the Soho Rep, which is ending its three-decade tenancy on Walker Street with this production for a residency at Playwrights Horizons in midtown. Jacobs-Jenkins and Troyano’s play is an apt way to mark that transition, as well as an interesting exploration of the necessary maturing of creative artists and how much of their younger, scrappier selves they leave behind as they become more established.
Troyano, a Cuban-born dynamo with short-cropped hair with a nest of Big Bird yellow highlights on top, has become so enmeshed with Carmelita that many of her students and collaborators are unaware that it’s her not actual name. And that idea gives way to the show’s unusual premise: She decides to retire the persona, along with Carmelita’s bedazzled brassiere and a belt with dangling plantains covered in gold glitter. So Jacobs-Jenkins, flush with funding from his recent mainstream Broadway success, steps in with an offer to buy the character off of her and develop it himself as if it were some form of comic-book IP. (While Troyano plays herself, the talented Ugu Chukwu portrays a heightened version of Jacobs-Jenkins who keeps insisting that he’s “not rich.”)
The show has all the hallmarks of a downtown production from the turn of the 21st century: an absurdist plot with a strong meta/autobiographical component and sudden shifts in setting and tone; musical numbers that spring out of nowhere; roles for everyone from a shorts-wearing Walt Whitman to a big-busted cockroach married to a mouse; and, of course, oversize puppets (designed by Greg Corbino, who also did the costumes) — including a goldfish who grows in size from scene to scene and at one point delivers a meandering but hilarious lecture about philosophy (“as long as someone has also imagined us, we continue to exist”). It also has a scenic design, by Mimi Lien and Tatiana Kahvegian, that’s a surprisingly sophisticated homage to low-budget theater productions, with flimsy-looking set-pieces and painted curtains.
Like many of the shows that it’s celebrating, Get Me Carmelita Tropicana! can grow tedious — taxing an audience’s good will (and patience) over the course of two intermissionless hours. The cast, which also includes Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Keren Lugo, and the scene-stealing Will Dagger, shift between multiple roles with the game energy of veteran improvisers. Though the show raises some interesting questions about the nature of theater and identity, director Eric Ting isn’t interested in exploring those ideas with much psychological nuance. While Troyano and Chukwu both have moments where they address the audience in a more thoughtful, conversational manner, his main note seems to be: Go broad or go home.
That’s fine as far as it goes. Downtown theater has sometimes earned a rep for dourness, an allergy to humor or even light-heartedness, and that’s certainly not the case with Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! While I didn’t find myself laughing as much as those around me, a late speech by Jacobs-Jenkins provided a nearly-too-late statement of purpose that made me better appreciate the deliberate amateurishness of some of the material. “Now you’re probably asking yourself, ‘What’s this play about?'” he begins, before adding a cunning non-sequitur: “To which I might reply, ‘Interesting…'”
Jacobs-Jenkins goes on to explain how he spent the “salad days” of his youth going to underground theater not for meaning or narrative but for the vibe: “There was a lot of energy and ideas and ingenuity and curiosity and wonder and interesting failure and the tickets were cheap.” (For what it’s worth, Soho Rep tickets run as low as $35.) I just wish Troyano and Jacobs-Jenkins had spent more time honing their nostalgia for an earlier, seat-of-the-pants approach to theater-making into a production that succeeds not just conceptually but as an experience.
GIVE ME CARMELITA TROPICANA
Soho Rep, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Dec. 15
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