Theatre in Review: Give Me Carmelita Tropicana (Soho Rep)

	Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Keren Lugo, Ugo Chukwu, Alina Troyano, Will Dagger. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Give Me Carmelita Tropicana is both a farce and a requiem and if that sounds like a tall order, I suggest you drop in at Soho Rep's Walker Street venue and see for yourself. It will be your last opportunity to do so, as the company is vacating its longtime home to become roommates with Playwrights Horizons on Theatre Row. There's no word about what will happen with the Walker Street Theatre, but, given the way the neighborhood is going, one fears the baristas will soon be moving in.

For its downtown valedictory, the company has selected a comedy with a bizarre and self-referential premise. It begins in a law firm boardroom, with a meeting between playwrights (and, in this case, co-authors) Alina Troyano and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. (She appears as herself; he is impersonated by Ugo Chukwu.) The occasion is a "live IP" transaction: Alina is there to transfer the rights to her onstage persona Carmelita Tropicana to Branden, her former student. One might wonder why a well-known performer would give away -- even for a substantial cash payment -- the character who has been the foundation of her career since at least 1987. But that's before the flashbacks kick in.

Indeed, before we can take in the oddness of this proposition, Alina and Branden step out of the action to explain how it came about, setting up a kind of two-person Rashomon. Alina, citing poverty and a drought in bookings, apparently announced it is time to "retire" (her word) or "kill" (Branden's recollection) Carmelita Tropicana. Branden, who sees Alina's comment as a cry for help, breaks into her apartment, igniting a brawl that ends with him knocked out by a bust of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, the seventeenth-century poet-philosopher nun. Meanwhile, taking a leaf from Hollywood body-switching comedies like Freaky Friday or Vice Versa, Carmelita Tropicana -- who is a distinct entity subletting space inside Alina's body - decides to inhabit Branden instead. She has big plans: "I thought together you and I would conquer The Broadway! The HBO! The Netflix! What about my limited series -- The Brown Lotus?! What about my three-part concept album, Renacimiento?! Beyonce, she will want to collaborate with me!"

Meanwhile, Alina and Brandon get pulled into the vortex of "Phantasmagoria," which Alina describes as "a place I have invented, where all of my characters live." Phantasmagoria is the right word for this madcap, surreal landscape: Among the pit stops are a Havana night club where Alina, who is now half-gorilla, performs; a bus stop presided over by Pingalito Betancourt, "the original Cuban mansplainer" and author of the poem "Ode to the Cuban Man; and the lair of Martina, a cockroach (whose husband, a mouse, meets a grisly death in a pot of soup), and Arriero, a horse. Hang on for the goldfish -- a leftover from one of Branden's classroom performance pieces at NYU -- which grows progressively larger and more alarming with each scene. ("I can't wait to ruin everything you love," it tells Branden with quiet Mafioso menace.) There are also cameo appearances by Sor Juana, the late playwright/director Maria Irene Fornes, and Walt Whitman, who keeps busy serving shots and performing Lana Del Rey hits on a karaoke machine. "I also want to be very clear with you that this is a work of non-fiction," Branden says. "All of this actually happened and is 100% true." Next, he'll be selling us a bridge spanning the East River.

To be sure, Troyano and Jacobs-Jenkins have a good time salting the text with truth-or-consequences gags. When Alina cries poor, Branden informs us, "She owns a building." "I own a building with my sister," she snaps, shooing away any impression of real estate wealth. Admitting that the money for this transaction comes from years of writing for "peak TV," Branden keeps frantically insisting, "I'm not rich." Taking the nightclub stage, Alina performs a derisive song about Branden in Spanish, a language he can only partly make out. ("I distinctly heard a 'social negro' and 'intellectual' and 'Broadway'," he says, sourly.) Carmelita, given to reliving her past glories, cries out ecstatically, "Remember how regal I looked hosting the 2015 Bessie Awards at the Apollo Theater!"

Does it matter that Give Me Carmelita Tropicana is too long by at least thirty minutes? That Eric Ting's staging often amounts to barely controlled chaos? Or that Mimi Lien and Tatiana Kahvegian's set design is unwieldy and the lighting by Barbara Samuels often looks like a box of gels thrown at the stage? Probably not: The mess is the point. Indeed, the entire enterprise is suffused with nostalgia for downtown New York in the 1980s, which -- filthy, unruly, unsafe, and AIDS-ravaged as it may have been -- nevertheless was a hotbed of wild experimentation. Populated by a cast of characters ranging from Joanne Akalaitis to Lois Weaver, this sometimes-kooky, sometimes-great universe included the cross-cultural and cross-genre experiments of Mabou Mines and The Wooster Group; the three-dimensional dreamscapes of Richard Foreman, the primal screams of Karen Finley (one of the notorious NEA Four, along with Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes); the lesbian feminist provocations of WOW Cafe; the cross-dressing cutups Charles Ludlam, Charles Pierce, John "Lypsinka" Epperson, and The Lady Bunny; and the stately puppet spectacles of Theodora Skipitares, with seemingly every other production introduced by regal Ellen Stewart, waving a tiny tea bell and announcing, in that unplaceable accent, "Welcome to La Mama E.T.C." It's a lost world and, love it or hate it, it's never coming back.

As Branden, who is really too young to remember downtown in its heyday, notes, "There was a lot of energy and ideas and ingenuity and curiosity and wonder and interesting failure and the tickets were cheap. And there was almost always some sort of musical number or dance break to some slightly obscure pop song performed by a lot of not particularly gifted 'dancers' who always seemed like they were simply living out some fantasy of being in a music video. And, yes, a lot of it was... excruciating, but some of that theatre was actually quite transcendent. Genuinely surprising. Occasionally mind-altering."

Whatever you think of it, Give Me Carmelita Tropicana lives up to that standard, thanks in part to a supporting cast that includes Octavia Chavez-Richmond, whether strutting as a showgirl or waving a cigar as Pingalito; Will Dagger, the sort of actor who doesn't blink when asked to don a leather body suit, high-heeled boots, and a mane; and Keren Lugo, a deft caricaturist whether playing a legal shark or an uxorious cockroach. Greg Corbino's costumes are wildly inventive as are his increasingly enormous goldfish puppets. (It's not his fault that the goldfish monologue is the play's tedious low point.) Co-sound and video designers Tei Blow and Jeremy Kadetsky deliver some amusingly overwrought musical underscoring and a series of pow/zowie/kabam effects during the fight scenes, along with such images as an enormous eyeball. The production required the services of no fewer than three hair, wig, and makeup designers, and the team of Cookie Jordan, Yamie Lopez-Ramirez, and Alberto "Albee" Alvarado, do just fine.

For whatever reason, subsequent generations haven't produced anything to match the astounding parade of personalities generated during New York's grittiest, often most desperate years. Troyano/Carmelita is one of the last active survivors, everyone else having retired, moved on, or migrated to that great storefront stage in the sky. I can't begin to predict your likely response to a production that is, at various times, funny, pointed, self-indulgent, borderline incoherent, aggravatingly dull, and yet oddly touching. But if you ever cared about the old downtown theatre days, you may not want to miss it. It's a milestone moment. And best of luck to Soho Rep in Midtown. --David Barbour