Among the downtown New York theater scene’s most enduring of experimental companies, Soho Rep will take up residence at Playwrights Horizons for the next few seasons after spending the last 30-odd years producing works at 46 Walker Street.
The company bids farewell to the 65-seat venue on a cheerful insider note with Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, which bowed Sunday. This dizzying comedy is a collaboration between notable Soho Rep alumni (and current members of its board of directors) Alina Troyano, better known as the satirical performance artist Carmelita Tropicana, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the award-winning author of Appropriate and Gloria, whose An Octoroon premiered there.
A bright-eyed presence, Troyano pivots at the center of the show’s busy two-hour proceedings as she portrays both Alina, a Cuban-American avant-garde artist “of a certain age” struggling to earn a living, and variations of her vivacious, gender-bending Carmelita Tropicana personage. Sometimes simultaneously.
Key to the story’s premise is that when Alina contemplates retirement, Branden (Ugo Chukwu), Alina’s former star pupil at NYU and longtime admirer in real life, offers to purchase the rights to Carmelita Tropicana. The play starts with a conventional comedy scene in a conference room when Alina prepares to sign away her Carmelita alter ego to Branden. Initialing clauses in the sales agreement causes Alina to review her life and artistic times on the Lower East Side since the 1980s.
Everything quickly slides down a wacky rabbit hole of recollection as both Alina and Branden crash land in “Phantasmagoria,” which she describes as a depository of imagination and where characters from her previous works reside. There, longtime fans of the writer-performer will again encounter the droll likes of her creations such as the “original Cuban man-splainer” bus driver Pingalito, the cockroach journalist Martina and the Mexican conqueror Hernan Cortes’ sadistic horse Arriero. In the meantime, Branden is intermittently possessed by Carmelita Tropicana’s persona even as he is being pursued by an increasingly bigger talking goldfish he once abused in an NYU drama class project.
Describing coherently any remaining craziness is impossible except to note that the comedy’s themes lightly involve matters of identity, academic jibber-jabber, queer theory, Lower East Side redevelopment, lesbian thespians and much more. The influential figures of Maria Irene Fornes and Walt Whitman pop up. There is karaoke and dancing and shadow puppets and lip-syncing to Carmen Miranda. Ultimately, the show delivers an antic retrospective celebration of Troyano’s satirical creativity as well as a tribute to the kind of lower-budget experimental theater that she and in certain respects Soho Rep have represented for decades.
Yes, there’s a lot of inside baseball references here for avant-garde theater lovers, who naturally comprise the comedy’s intended audience. (Newbies are likely to find themselves bewildered, if not unamused.) The play ends on an affirmative note about the transcendent power of theater, regardless of whether a work is an artistic success or failure or the elusive sort of effort described as “interesting.”
Eric Ting, the director, smoothly rolls out the comedy’s rapid series of black-out scenes thanks in part to the fluent settings co-designed by Mimi Lien and Tatiana Kahvegian that often deploy illustrated traveler curtains to provide backgrounds for numerous locations. Puppet and costume designer Greg Corbino devises fun get-ups for the animal characters; his ever-larger pink-ish goldfish puppets are a treat to see. Lighting designer Barbara Samuels brightens everything with color. The sound and video co-designers, Tei Blow and Jeremy Kadetsky, neatly support the action with samplings of music, soundtracks, and images. The director and designers handily demonstrate with their craft how big things can happen even on small stages.
Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Will Dagger and Keren Lugo nicely handle several roles each, an upbeat Ugo Chukwu handsomely embodies Branden, and Alina Troyano, of course, is an inimitable bundle of mischievous energy as herself and as the iconic cultural commentator Carmelita Tropicana.
Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! opened November 10, 2024, at 46 Walker Street and runs through December 15. Tickets and information: sohorep.org
