I’ve little urge for food to spend the subsequent 4 years gloomily referencing present occasions in my critiques, so let’s get this out of the best way. It was an enormous aid to spend a night quickly after the Presidential election in a distinct period. Not essentially a extra harmless time, only one the place creative danger was the norm, and cultural manufacturing was not impoverished by AI, IP, or social media. The interval? May very well be the Nineteen Eighties or ’90s, when downtown efficiency artwork was in excessive ferment. Or possibly it’s 2007, when theater child Branden Jacobs-Jenkins took Alina Troyano’s NYU class. Troyano’s outrageous, longtime alter ego is Carmelita Tropicana, a Carmen Miranda-like gender satirist and social critic liable to sporting campy, trash-glam outfits and barking quickly in a thick Cuban accent. By Troyano, Jacobs-Jenkins turned smitten with the romance of the previous East Village, its anarchy, its queer aesthetic freedom. Nonetheless, life would take him from efficiency artwork to being certainly one of his technology’s most celebrated playwrights (e.g., Applicable). The endearingly loony Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! represents the fusion of Troyano’s decades-long apply, and Jacobs-Jenkins’s vicarious nostalgia for his mentor’s world.
The 2 are co-authors of the absurdist comedy, which occurs to be the ultimate manufacturing to run at Soho Rep, based 49 years in the past. Plenty of recollections are churning by way of theater geek heads at 46 Walker Avenue. Personally, I reeled within the years (25 of them) fascinated about the Richard Maxwell present I did there, Cowboys & Indians, during which I adopted a British accent and a robotic deadpan. Through the years I’ve had my thoughts routinely dismantled at Soho Rep: a number of neo-dadaist performs by Mac Wellman, Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, Melissa James Gibson’s [sic], Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Public Obscenities, and Jacobs-Jenkins’s personal An Octoroon. The corporate has the power to utterly reinvent its area each time, magically endowing its black field with larger depth, or utilizing its basement to evoke subterranean dimensions below our seats.
This polymorphous manufacturing—directed with frisky panache by Eric Ting—is not any completely different. The scenic design is by Mimi Tien, an previous hand at crafting bodily environments that maintain shifting and unfolding earlier than our eyes. Right here Tien (and co-designer Tatiana Kahvegian) takes us from a sterile, grey lawyer’s workplace to an eclectically furnished East Village loft and eventually, a candy-colored land known as Phantasmagoria, the place cockroaches and mice have amorous affairs and Troyano’s literary influences spend pandemic lockdown collectively.
I’m not totally certain that recounting the hallucinogenic plot would destroy its goofy randomness. We open with a gathering between Branden (Ugo Chukwu) Alina (Troyano herself) with their respective attorneys (Will Dagger and Keren Lugo) brandishing contracts. Alina is there to signal over intellectual-property rights over Carmelita Tropicana to Branden. She, in a depressed funk, has determined to “kill” her creation, and Branden thinks he could make a TV present out of her. Alina then abruptly breaks the fourth wall and proceeds to tells us how she bought right here. What follows in an prolonged flashback is the twisty story of teacher-student rivalry, with Branden because the patronizing ex-pupil-made-good who views Alina with pity verging on ageist contempt. He blithely refers to Alina’s “dotage” and wonders if she might need early-onset dementia.
Decided to get the rights to Carmelita, Branden breaks into Alina’s home whereas she’s asleep and whispers in her ear, “Give me Carmelita Tropicana!” upon which she wakes and clocks him with a bust of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th century nun and poet. Branden wakes up in “Phantasmagoria”—a surreal realm the place all of Alina’s characters reside.
To make an extended synopsis brief, the spirit of Carmelita Tropicana possesses Branden’s physique (shades of All of Me and Venom) and finally, to exorcise the rogue fictive persona (who, in spite of everything, simply needs to outlive), Branden’s spirit should inhabit Alina’s physique and that bust of Sor Juana can be a vital device to ship Carmelita again to the land of make-believe. It’s sophisticated—deliciously so. There’s a goldfish from Branden’s previous that he coughs up whereas in Phantasmagoria, which grows monstrously large all through the course of the play (droll puppets by Greg Corbino). Dagger has a barnstormer of a monologue because the fish, which has achieved edgelord sentience and plans to wreak revenge on the world.
Ting and the playwrights are blessed by a really interesting, versatile solid. Chukwu is dryly hilarious and charming because the play’s straight man (so to talk); Lugo transforms elegantly from a femme cockroach to the butch Sor Juana; and secret weapon Octavia Chavez-Richmond is equally vivid as a male Cuban bus driver and, later, a sweetly sensible María Irene Fornés (the late, nice experimental playwright). After which, after all, there’s Troyano herself, a joyous imp who has infectious enjoyable lampooning our present-day digital dystopia. To be sincere, I’m each sick and frightened of this world, during which consideration is monetized and conformity incentivized. Carmelia Tropicana: Take us all to Phantasmagoria!
Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! | 2hrs. No intermission. | Soho Rep | 46 Walker Avenue | boxoffice@sohorep.org | Purchase Tickets Right here
