You never can tell where your inheritance will come from, but the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins almost missed out on some of his.
In 2007, as a New York University graduate student, he nearly dropped a course on the uses and abuses of sentimentality because it conflicted with a job he had just gotten at The New Yorker. But it was a small class, and he was the only guy. So his instructor — Alina Troyano, the Cuban-born Obie Award winner who teaches under her stage name, Carmelita Tropicana — put up a fight.
“He stayed in the class because I begged him to stay,” she said.
Thus began an acquaintanceship that turned into a friendship that turned into a collaboration: “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!,” their hallucinatory new play at Soho Rep. It is the last production at the theater’s longtime home, in TriBeCa, before the company moves into temporary accommodations at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown. Written by the two of them, and starring her, it is about creative legacy, generational change and the ways that autobiographically and culturally specific art made by one person can live, and morph, inside others.
In the show, Troyano performs as both Alina and her comic alter ego, Carmelita: a feminist, sex-positive lesbian from Havana who borrows stereotypes to send them up, campily ridiculing bigotry, misogyny, machismo, colonialism. Ugo Chukwu plays Branden.
The trippy premise is that when Alina threatens to kill Carmelita, an alarmed Branden asks her to sell him the persona instead. How this would work when Carmelita has lived inside Alina since before Branden was born is the mind-bending question at hand.
Then again, a bit of the real Troyano, a product of the fertile East Village theater scene of the 1980s, already lives inside the real Jacobs-Jenkins, whose Broadway play “Appropriate” won this year’s Tony Award for best revival. Like all good teachers, she meant to plant a seed.
She also considered putting an end to Carmelita, albeit not lately. Walking around downtown Manhattan on a sunny October afternoon, she told me the impulse arose when she had been performing the character for about a dozen years.
“Sometimes I wanted to kill her,” she said. “But she also was somebody who let me discover who I was. So it’s a mixed bag. It’s almost like people get married. And then they go, ‘Wow, what have I done?’”
Troyano and Carmelita do of course share a body, a 5-foot frame topped with curls colored a vivid shade of yellow called Electric Banana. But the thing about Carmelita, who first came to life in the early ’80s at the WOW Café Theater, is the unusual degree to which her identity has mingled and blurred with Troyano’s.
Jacobs-Jenkins first knew Troyano as Carmelita and, like many people in her orbit, called her by that name. Only in recent years has he made an effort to call her Alina.
“I still kind of slip,” he said.
Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays — including “An Octoroon,” which premiered at Soho Rep in 2014 — are often rooted in a fascination with history. To hear Troyano talk about the downtown scene she had been a part of was history at closer range.
Carmelita Tropicana’s name first appeared in The New York Times in a 1986 listing for a poetry benefit. She was among a wild agglomeration of talent: Spalding Gray, Joseph Chaikin, David Cale, Richard Foreman and two performance artists who later became part of the so-called N.E.A. Four, Karen Finley and Tim Miller.
That same year, the original cast of Troyano’s first play, “Memories of the Revolution” — written with Uzi Parnes — included Holly Hughes, another of the N.E.A. Four, and three of the future Five Lesbian Brothers: Moe Angelos, Peg Healy and Lisa Kron, now a Tony winner for “Fun Home.”
The art and influence of that era have since trickled uptown and into the wider culture, as boundary-bending art tends to do. One of the hottest plays on Broadway right now, Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” is part of the queer branch of that lineage. So, about a decade ago, was “Fun Home.”
Each of those shows arrived, Kron said, after a “scaffolding of legibility” had been built that allowed the mainstream to understand it. The same is true of the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere,” on which Kron is a writer.
‘Your Art Is Your Weapon’
Troyano, who prefers to be vague about her age, was 11 when her family came to New York from Cuba in the ’60s. Raised in the Forest Hills section of Queens, she has lived on Avenue C since 1984, in a building that she owns with her sister and frequent collaborator, Ela. She has a sphynx cat named Tutti, short for Tutankhamen.
Shy and even now prone to what she calls “horrible stage fright,” Troyano was drawn to theater growing up. But she couldn’t find a way into it until she encountered WOW, a feminist and mostly lesbian collective that in its nascent days was on East 11th Street. She also needed to figure out her own sexuality.
One life-changer: seeing the now landmark 1981 lesbian play, “Split Britches,” there. Another: discovering that feminists and lesbians were not ultraserious and unfunny. At WOW, they exuded “such joie,” Troyano recalled.
“I was looking for theater and I was looking for, you know, ‘Am I a lesbian, am I not?’” she said. “I was looking for two things without knowing it. And I got them both.”
What she wasn’t looking for, as a civil servant working for the city, was to be publicly known for making countercultural art. So she invented a stage name.
As for creating a persona, it was less scary to slip into Carmelita than to step onstage as herself.
Costumes have helped, too, ever since Ela and Parnes gave her a dress for Carmelita as a Christmas gift, before the character’s debut.
“It’s your armor, right?” she said. “It’s the thing that makes me not be shy.”
One costume in “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!” is a bodysuit inscribed with the names of downtown performance spaces that have been important in her life, like Dixon Place and P.S. 122. There are also significant words, like “Kunst.”
Troyano’s motto is “Your Kunst is your Waffen” (“your art is your weapon”), which is also the subtitle of a campy, feminist 1994 film she made with Ela. But there, unlike in the Soho Rep show, she could hide inside her bolder alter ego.
“That’s why this play is so hard,” Troyano said. “Because I stayed away from playing Alina always. And here I have to play that, and that’s terrifying.”
A Fantastical Tour
The performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz, a mentor of Jacobs-Jenkins who died in 2013, wrote in his 1999 book, “Disidentifications,” that Carmelita was among the “queer performers of color who specialize in the interweaving of passion and comedy in intricate and self-sustaining fashions.”
“Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!” takes a fantastical tour of Troyano’s work, nodding to shows like “Milk of Amnesia” (Jacobs-Jenkins’s favorite) and “With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?” It’s peppered with her characters, including Pingalito, a drag persona whom Troyano calls “the original Cuban mansplainer”; Arriero, a monologuing Spanish horse; and a high-strung cockroach married to a mouse.
One of Troyano’s major influences was the performance artist Jack Smith, who died in 1989. Troyano used to watch him perform at the old Pyramid Club. The plunger that Carmelita carries is in homage to him.
Apropos of such “traces of Jack” in her work, Muñoz wrote: “Charles Ludlam was quoted as saying that Jack was the father of us all.”
There were mothers, too. Kron considers the company Split Britches, Hughes and Carmelita Tropicana formative.
“Paula Vogel always talks about how every playwright has a god play, which is the play that lit their theatrical imagination,” she said. “That’s who those artists were for me.”
Troyano’s own creative inheritance also comes from her mentors María Irene Fornés and Graciela Daniele, with whom she studied at Intar, a Latin-focused theater company.
Jacobs-Jenkins is one of Troyano’s inheritors, not least because she is an example of a queer artist of color navigating an overwhelmingly white theater milieu on her own terms.
“In some ways she was always the only X, Y, Z in a room for so much of her career,” he said. “She’s always kind of stood her ground.”
I asked Troyano, perhaps unfairly, what would happen if she ever did stop performing Carmelita and was just herself.
“Oh, but that cannot be,” she said, in Carmelita’s voice. She laughed and added, in her own: “I’ll become a tree.”
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