Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Karen Lugo, Ugo Chukwu, Alina Troyano, and Will Dagger in Give Me Carmelita Tropicana. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

As the audience filed out of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana at the performance I attended, many–myself included–paused in the lobby or on Walker Street, just outside the front door of Soho Rep: To take a picture, to offer a silent thanks. To say goodbye. Because Give Me Carmelita Tropicana, jointly written by Alina Troyano and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and directed by Soho Rep co-director Eric Ting, is not only explicitly about parting from the artistic work and homes in which we are rooted–about what it means, in both a literal and a wildly metaphorical sense, to hand over one’s legacy–but also replicates that gesture in its very existence. The downtown venues that birthed NY’s avant-garde theater and performance art scenes have been trickling away for years now, but this fall—as if the world weren’t apocalyptic enough—we’re taking two more heavy blows: the unexpected departure of the Connelly a few weeks ago and the planned but no less unwelcome loss of Soho Rep’s longtime space on Walker Street at the end of this show’s run. (Granted, the Walkerspace theater has often felt like it’s held together by hot glue, gaff tape, and sheer force of will, but it’s continually hosted some of the finest new American theater work of the past 30 years. Fortunately, Soho Rep itself will live on.)

Alina Troyano’s performance alter ego, the queer Cuban American force of nature Carmelita Tropicana, has a timeline that parallels the history of Soho Rep: Soho Rep produced their first new play in 1981, and WOW Cafe, Carmelita’s first theatrical home, launched in 1980. Carmelita/Troyano and Jacobs-Jenkins both have history with Soho Rep, as well: Jacobs-Jenkins’s first big hit play, An Octoroon, premiered at Soho Rep in 2014, and Carmelita was one of the first participants in Soho Rep’s pandemic-spurred granting project, Project Number One. Both serve on Soho Rep’s board. 

There’s so much history here, in other words, history that is very much at the heart of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana, though to call it a history play is to make it sound approximately a thousand times less weird, phantasmagoric, touching, and elegiac than it is. Romping through styles and levels of reality and/or theatrical realism with abandon, the play starts and ends in the dullest of lawyer’s offices, where a “Living IP” deal for the characters of Carmelita Tropicana is ostensibly being signed between “Alina Troyano” (playing herself) and “Branden Jacobs-Jenkins” (played with utter commitment and more than a little glee by Ugo Chukwu). But even in this most mundane of settings, the complicated questions start to proliferate. Alina’s lawyer (Keren Lugo) opens with a series of microaggressions, for one thing, but more significantly, Alina seems caught in an internal dialogue. Is she torn about her decision to sign over her rights to Carmelita in perpetuity? Is she arguing with Carmelita in her mind? Or is something else going on? Therein lies our play. 

The piece ricochets among various metaphysical operations of identity here, as the lines between physical body, “real-world” person, and character in performance blur and tangle: Troyano-as-writer, Alina-as-character, Troyano-as-actor playing Alina and Carmelita and sometimes Branden and other roles as well, Carmelita-as-legal-entity, Troyano-as-Carmelita in capacities other than purely performative (it seems relevant to mention here that it’s Carmelita Tropicana, not Alina Troyano, who serves as a board member of Soho Rep); Jacobs-Jenkins-as-writer, Branden-as-character, Chukwu-as-actor playing Branden-as-writer-and-character, Chukwu-as-actor playing Carmelita-as-character. Hell, sometimes the entire ensemble (in addition to Lugo, Will Dagger and Octavia Chavez-Richmond play a series of parts with limitless gusto) gets in on the act, putting on Troyano masks to become a series of Carmelitas.

And even the more “realist” sections of the play, set in Alina’s apartment, shimmer with questions about the nature of theatrical reality, as Branden and Alina have distinctly different memories of the inciting conversation, in which Alina confesses her first thoughts about getting rid of Carmelita and Branden immediately offers to buy her. (Mimi Lien and Tatiana Kahvegian’s set feels like a magician’s trick cabinet that reveals something different each time a curtain is pulled, but Alina’s apartment, a painted backdrop whose richness of detail extends to the classic works of feminist performance painted onto the bookshelf, is one of its best bits.) From there, we ascend into a series of increasingly baroque spirals between “the real world” and Phantasmagoria, an infinite void in which reside all of the side characters created by Carmelita–including a cockroach “Real Housewife” married to a mouse (Lugo, who somehow successfully combines breathy-voiced sexpot and insect), Hernan Cortez’s horse, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Walt Whitman, a mansplaining Cuban bus conductor, and the great Cuban American playwright and teacher Maria Irene Fornés, as well as an ever-growing, philosophically inclined goldfish. The fish, voiced by Dagger, gets one of the play’s best monologues, where he gives the audience a tiny handle on what’s currently going on, fish-splains the life cycle of goldfish, and ends with a vow of revenge on Branden, who used him as a prop in a youthful performance art piece. (This really happened.)  (Greg Corbino’s costume and puppet work reaches its apotheosis with the goldfish, who travels from lifesize through four or five larger versions, all instantly recognizable and floating through puppet-space in a marvelous way.) 

As Branden and Alina shuttle back and forth from Phantasmagoria–the journey triggered by a slapstick bonk on the head from an enchanted bust of Sor Juana–the not-quite-legally-separate Carmelita tries to make an arrangement of her own: if Alina wants to get rid of her, she’ll just have to find another body to occupy. Branden wants her, Branden can have her…until she learns that his plans for her legacy involve many archives and not a lot of collaborating with Beyoncé. As Branden says, “We’re talking about a very niche market here. Most of the venues in which you would have been recognized are gone.” 

Whether any of this makes literal narrative or even literal emotional sense is utterly beside the point (and anyone who gets most of the way to the end still wanting narrative logic will be politely schooled by Branden in a wistful remembrance of experimental theater). Yes, it can get didactic or spiral off into tangents that are wonderful moments but don’t bring much to the whole. Yes, perhaps there’s a few too many inside jokes, and maybe having Branden pause at the end to give his rationale to the audience feels a little bit like the full confession at the end of a crime novel. Still, Give Me Carmelita Tropicana never fails to engage, entertain, provoke, make the mind spin, thanks both to Troyano’s love for and commitment to all the products of her imagination and to director Eric Ting’s exceptional work. As with Jacob-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance last year, Ting builds an ensemble so engaged and attentive in every moment that even the smallest, most throwaway lines and gestures become precise, meaningful parts of the whole–for example, the moment, right after Branden’s entrance, when Chukwu sets down a number of shopping bags from high-end retailers. We may not always have a clear understanding of what’s going on, but we never doubt that the artists do.

But beyond that, the show takes us to that experimental theater moment, that moment of going to the theater just for the sake of being there; as Branden says, “I went for the experience. I went because there was something almost mystical for me in the act of sitting with a bunch of strangers in the dark and hallucinating together a thing that wasn’t really happening.” This show may have a larger budget and a team of better-resourced designers than some of those basement spaces of the 1980s, but in many ways retains the stripped-down aesthetic, with most of its set pieces painted on drops or looking like cardboard with a lick of paint. 

The play doesn’t mindlessly valorize that era. The economic precarity of theater institutions and theater artists is never far from the surface. Branden muses frequently that even his recent fairly stunning success doesn’t put him in a position to own real estate, the way Alina (who presumably bought a building in the year when they were giving away the Lower East Side) does. Conversely, Branden doesn’t have a “day job” managing a building. Even the goldfish feels like an unacknowledged, uncompensated collaborator–it’s facetious, sure, but it’s also true that so much of that work was done purely as unpaid labors of love, which was a lot easier in a less gentrified NYC. Too, where much New York avant-garde theater drowned in its own self-seriousness, Give Me Carmelita thrives on both Jacobs-Jenkins’s and Troyano’s willingness to poke fun at themselves and their work: Carmelita greedily dashing from body to body, convinced of her own monumental significance. Alina waging battle with a toilet plunger. Branden being chased down by a giant goldfish–and reminding us, in the aforementioned monologue, that a lot of avant-garde theater was little short of excruciating. 

But at its most serious, and its most meaningful, Give Me Carmelita is about artistic lineage and artistic legacy. Alina Troyano was Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s professor; Maria Irene Fornes was Troyano’s–and the mentor to a whole generation of playwrights; Jacobs-Jenkins, too, uses her writing prompts in his own teaching. We can’t preserve the buildings; with performance art like Carmelita Tropicana’s, tied inextricably to her creator, we may not even be able to preserve the work. As Branden says, “I didn’t know the future. I didn’t know the way certain experiences and people could just… disappear, leave you.” The best we can do is let the artists keep passing their torches; let the teachers inspire a new generation; and keep showing up for the experience. Walkerspace may be dead, but long live Soho Rep.