Long before he became a Tony-winning playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins enrolled at NYU in hopes of becoming a downtown performance artist, and took a course taught by Carmelita Tropicana, which is the stage name – or alternative persona – of the Cuban-American downtown performance artist Alina Troyano. 

Now, the two have collaborated on “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana,” a wild ride of a play that exults in the hallucinatory humor of Carmelita Tropicana’s performance art. Co-written by the two of them and starring Troyano leading a five-member cast, the play is being presented by Soho Rep as the final production at Walkerspace, the theater’s longtime home, which it can no longer afford. (It is leaving Soho and moving in with Playwrights Horizons uptown.)

That “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana” is Walkerspace’s valedictory production feels apt, because the play is an act of nostalgia and an homage to an entire theater scene that itself in effect closed up shop. That theater scene was in the East Village, where Alina Troyano first unveiled Carmelita four decades ago. As Branden Jacobs-Jenkins says to Carmelita Tropicana in the play: “Most of the venues where you would have been recognized are gone. PS122? The Pyramid club? The Chandelier? I think they’re all condominiums now.”

Actually, it isn’t really Branden Jacobs-Jenkins who says this in the play; it’s the actor Ugo Chukwu, who portrays Branden on stage. And it’s not really Carmelita Tropicana (nor Alina Troyano) to whom he’s telling this. It’s….well, I have to back up to explain. Like the East Village plays it recalls, “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana” is confusing, but comically so — also amateurish but in a sophisticated way; and sometimes “excruciating” but mostly great fun.

The first two scenes, which are funny and relatively easy to follow, set out the initial premise.  Branden and Alina have become friends since that long-ago NYU class, enough so that, one night when Alina is feeling down, she telephones him and tells him she’s thinking of getting rid of her persona. The two share with the audience their differing account of that conversation: He remembers her saying she wants to “kill” Carmelita Tropicana. Alina says she said she wanted to “retire” her. In any case, Branden has an inspiration: Why doesn’t he buy “Carmelita Tropicana” from Alina?

In the first scene, we see them negotiating the sale of the Intellectual Property with lawyers, a spot-on satire but within the parameters of conventional theater. It’s at the end of the second scene that the play starts going off the rails. After the late-night phone conversation, Branden tells us, he wondered about her well-being, and decided to pay a visit to her apartment on that very night – climbing through her window, having donned “a pair of pantyhose over my face to protect it from the rain.” Alarmed, thinking him a burglar, she hit him over the head, knocking him unconscious.

Jacobs-Jenkins, who teaches at Yale and authored “Appropriate,” is too meticulous a playwright to create such an illogical scenario by accident (he donned pantyhose to protect his face from the rain?!) What the playwrights are doing here and throughout the play is spoofing some storytelling conventions. Branden enters dreamland, and even when he wakes up, he’s gotten amnesia. (Alina says “I have seen many telenovelas and k-dramas, so I knew a little something about amnesia and how to treat it.”)

It’s at this point that Branden has acquired Carmelita Tropicana – just not in the way he intended. She occupies his body. So, the conversation I alluded to earlier between Branden and Carmelita is between Branden as himself and Branden as Carmelita. Branden as Branden is talking about his plans for Carmelita – “I would see if I could get some sort of bidding war for your papers going between the Beinecke at Yale and the Houghton Collection at Harvard but you also can’t discount the Ransom Center at UT-Austin…” 

Branden as Carmelita isn’t pleased.

“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?! Beyoncé, she will want to collaborate with me! I need new music, new costumes! I must work with only the greatest composers, the greatest designers!”

Branden as Branden gently tries to lower Branden as Carmelita’s expectations: “I’m not sure your brand is quite ready for the mainstream in that way… We’re talking about a very niche market here. Its potential for wider saturation is… not not slim.” Branden as Carmelita reacts by smothering Branden as Branden with a pillow, decorated with the face of Walt Whitman.

He is sent back to dreamland – or, as Alina puts it, Phantasmagoria.

That’s where, we’re told, all the characters she’s created in previous shows reside. With the aid of the three other cast members, and numerous puppets, the show works them into a convoluted cartoon plot: There is Pingalito, a Cuban bus driver who’s the ultimate mansplainer; Arriero, from Spain, “one of the first horses to set hoof in the new world”; and Martina, a cockroach whom the horse loves but she’s married to Perez the mouse. Also making cameos are the writers Irene Maria Fornes, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz and Walt Whitman — the first Troyano’s mentor, the others two of her idols.

But there is one vivid character that is likely Jenkins-Jacobs’ contribution. For his final performance in her NYU class, we’re told, he had recited a monologue about the privatization of fresh water,  while drinking through a straw from a fishbowl that held a goldfish – until the fishbowl was almost out of water, and the fish was flopping around, in danger of dying. The goldfish returns for vengeance, in appearances that are increasingly hilarious,  with the exception of one monologue that is full of arcane philosophical musings. 

The fish shares such a predilection with the playwrights, although they make sure to pepper their ventures into esoterica with the saving grace of self-mockery. At one such moment, Branden describes Carmelita’s body of work as “…intersectional ‘minority’ urban American life in the latter half of the 20th century as expressed through the professional identity of the ‘gigging creative’ jargon jargon jargon theory theory theory.”

There is arguably a serious philosophical point that the playwrights are trying to make, which they’re not shy about spelling out in the play — that all the art that artists have invented, and all the artists who’ve inspired them, live on forever inside of them. 

In a kind of coda, Branden waxes enthusiastic about the experiences he had when he was younger attending “experimental” theater, although “I truly couldn’t tell you what exactly the experiment was or whether or not it succeeded…And, yes, a lot of it was excruciating, but some of that theater was actually quite transcendent.”  The play he has put together with his teacher and mentor seems clearly and cleverly an effort to replicate the experiences he had – including, evidently but not exclusively, with Carmelita Tropicana. And, yes, there are moments during its two hours without an intermission that might qualify as excruciating

It’s no disparagement  of the collaborators’ carefully-crafted chaos that the moment for me that came closest to transcendent was when Carmelita Tropicana came out at the end, wearing some kind of Amazon warrior bulbous breast plates, and talked impromptu about the difficult week – for her and for us – and how much she appreciated the 92 percent of Black women ad 88 percent of Jewish women “who voted to save democracy.” And she ended with her motto, in sort-of-German and then English: “Your Kunst Is Your Waffen. Your art is your weapon.”

Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!
Soho Rep through December 15
Running time: Two hours, no intermission
Tickets: $35. Rush: $20. 99 cents on Nov 17 and 24
Written by Alina Troyano and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Directed by Eric Ting
Scenic design by Mimi Lien and Tatiana Kahvegian, costume, prop and puppet design by Greg Corbino, lighting design by Barbara Samuels, sound and video design by Tei Blow and Jeremy Kadetsky, hair, wig and makeup design by Cookie Jordan, Yamie Lopez-Ramirez and Alberto “Albee” Alvarado
Cast: Carmelita Tropicana, Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Ugo Chukwu,Will Dagger, and Keren Lugo

Photos by Julieta Cervantes