GIVE ME CARMELITA TROPICANA! A Glorious Living Requiem — Review

I did not know who Carmelita Tropicana, the persona of the (so I learn) legendary performance artist Alina Troyano, was before the announcement of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, the show she co-created with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins which serves as the final production at Soho Rep’s longtime Tribeca home, before they’re priced out of their lease. My real New York theatregoing began sometime in the mid-2010s, and mostly on Broadway. I, of course, had the option of researching her prior to seeing it, but chose to go in blind.

This phenomenal fantasia – equal parts exaltation of the art of performance, requiem for downtown, and cri de cœur for artists to continue it through the clever, often-underground shapeshifting they’ve always managed to do – accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do which, thankfully for me, includes formally introducing Carmelita (who has been around since at least ‘86) into the canon. Because, oh yes, the fourth integral part of this living death rite is to both embalm Troyano’s performance of her, and ensure the persona’s eternity.

Jacobs-Jenkins, we learn early on, was once Tropicana’s star student at NYU (Troyano taught there in character), and the two have maintained a strong bond since. Represented onstage by Ugo Chukwu, the playwright appears as a sellout, toting shopping bags from Bloomingdales and spouting intimate jokes about Oprah like the Tony-winner he’s become. Troyano meets him at a drab law office, where she’s about to sell her “living IP” to him after deciding, in a flash of existential panic, that she wants to retire Carmelita. At the decisive moment of signing her over, Troyano stalls and slips into her subconscious, and the Jacobs-Jenkins stand-in explains how the two reached this impasse.

To detail the resulting plot would be both irrelevant to my critique and a disservice to its madcap, psychedelic enjoyment. Suffice it to say, an Irma Vep-ish crime element leads the two artists down a rabbit hole into Troyano's mind, represented by characters and situations from her oeuvre, and staged to feel (under Eric Ting’s direction, and by Mimi Lien and Tatiana Kahvegian’s joyously shifting, engaging scenic design) like that SpongeBob episode where Squidward falls into hell. The pitch perfect other cast members (Will Dagger, Octavia Chavez-Richmond, and Keren Lugo) switch from Troyano’s inventions (Arriero, an S&M’d horse; Pingalito, a mansplaining Cuban bus driver; and Martina, a bratty cockroach) to past advancers of the performed word (Walt Whitman, the playwright María Irene Fornés, and the 17th-century nun Juana Inés de la Cruz).

The production serves as a purposely raggedy tribute to the New York downtown which was once the fertile bed for radically queer, post-modern works of left-field art created far from the prying eyes of ‘good taste’; where the tastemakers thrived. One of Troyano’s costumes is emblazoned with the names of formative venues like Dixon Place and WOW Café, both of which still currently operate but are not the hotbeds of must-see avantgardism they once were – or at least not of works which can easily springboard onto larger platforms.

Or is that on me? First meeting Carmelita Tropicana as she takes her final Troyanic bows, I thought of the theatre I don’t experience, and that which, because of the epochal shifts in what downtown, avant-garde, and even performance art* even mean, or how they’re allowed to exist, I might never be able to. I began to think of what kind of theatregoer I might have been in the late 1980s.

Would I have gone? Would I have known about these shows? Would I have enjoyed them,  and would that have been a gut-reaction enjoyment in perfect harmony with its ethos, or the detached academic bemusement through which I enjoy reading about them today? Or would I have been part of the numbing, commercial-seeking blob that ushered them out of favor, and out of their spaces? I'd like to think I would have been there, supporting these outré artists. But then, am I doing that for their current iterations? Are the new ones even comparable, in style and wit and praxis, to the old?

The phantom pain is peculiar to a certain type of hopefully-not-pseudo-intellectuals (ew), similar to when I wonder if I'd have been proudly Out in previous decades: Does who I am – comprising what I love and what I do – belong to that higher, unbreakable chain of truth that passes through those in communion with art; or am I just a tourist enjoying its most readily available and displayed fruits?

The Jacobs-Jenkins avatar asks versions of these questions to himself in a vulnerable monologue toward the end, and this sense of loss undergirds his appearance, both in script and on stage. He speaks of the gross capitalistic mindset which leads him to immediately process ideas as pitches; a relatable byproduct of the gig-economy freelance brain. But isn’t that creative impulse, as refracted through the possibility of the materially available, the same which led someone like Troyano to create counter-cultural works in the bombed-out Lower East Side (Loisaida for Latinos) of the ‘80s – or any artist, ever, for that matter?

Jacobs-Jenkins’ Hamlet-ing is aired out plenty, and most compellingly physicalized by a goldfish he once used as a living prop in one of Tropicana’s classes (embodied, in comically enlarging iterations, courtesy Greg Corbino’s costume and puppet designs, by Dagger). Ever the callow NYU avant-gardist, Jacobs-Jenkins once recited an original monologue while sipping the water out of the fish’s bowl, before vomiting its life force back in as it gasped for life. The fish, throughout the decades, it appears, has held the psychic grudge.

A grudge, however, is not what Troyano seems to carry. Just as Jacobs-Jenkins’ navel-gazing (not derogatory) veers into making this a work of apologia (again, not bad), Troyano retakes the reigns and delivers a direct address to the audience that, as the script notes, involves her saying and doing “whatever she feels like.” At the Friday night performance I attended, some 72 hours after the US Presidential election, this meant a heartfelt speech about community resilience and organizing. When the Commander in Chief wouldn’t even say the word “AIDS” until thousands had already passed, queer artists rallied to make their fiercest art yet, protecting each other through direct action and through the comfort of truthful, essential art. “Your Kunst is your Waffen” (“your art is your weapon”) is Troyano’s motto, emblazoned as proudly on that same costume I mentioned earlier as it emanates from her like a halo.

This show is an ode to artists who perform to crowds that remain silent until that final applause; who know puzzled looks better than knowing nods, yet always go on. It’s delightfully stupid, more than a smidge obtuse (sorry to the non-Spanish speakers in the house), and unmediated in its indulgence – which is to say, art. Long Live Carmelita Tropicana.

* There’s a great line from the Jacobs-Jenkins avatar: “...back when I thought I was going to be a performance artist before I realized performance was going to be hijacked so unsustainably and boringly by the visual arts before descending further into unproductive inscrutability…”

Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! is in performance through December 15, 2024 at Soho Rep on Walker St in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.