Casting is set for Soho Rep's world premiere of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, penned by Alina Troyano (a.k.a. Carmelita Tropicana) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.
Directed by Eric Ting, the production will be the company's final staging at 46 Walker Street with performances set for October 23-December 1 with an official opening November 10.
Joining Obie winner Troyano onstage will be Octavia Chavez-Richmond (Mary Gets Hers, Fuente Ovejuna), Ugo Chukwu (Oklahoma! Primary Trust), Will Dagger (Corsicana, The Antelope Party), and Keren Lugo (At the Wedding, Privacy).
Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! is described as "part love letter to an iconic performance artist, part intergenerational debate about the legacy of 'downtown' New York, part theatrical interrogation of the uses and abuses of nostalgia, real estate, representation, and the avant-garde—and 100% fantastical journey in which Jacobs-Jenkins attempts to buy Tropicana from her creator… but at what cost?"
The two artists first met when Jacobs-Jenkins studied performance art with Troyano. Troyano also taught a class at NYU on sentimentality that Jacobs-Jenkins calls a “creative watershed”—and eventually Troyano connected Jacobs-Jenkins with his first professional gig, performing in PS122’s Avant Garde Arama. In June Jacobs-Jenkins won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play for Appropriate.
Says Troyano in a statement, “Sometimes I want to kill Carmelita Tropicana. She’s powerful, and puts me, her creator, under certain pressures. But Carmelita is great because she can come out at the best times. She can live in a bit of the subconscious until she manifests. So Branden and I entered into, and wrote, a conversation between two artists that are of different generations—our springboard being My Dinner with Andre and Freaky Friday—about how we change with time, about what makes our work relevant, and how the work can take on a mind and desires of its own to sustain that.”
Jacobs-Jenkins adds, “Soho Rep has been defined by a re-engagement with drama as a site of experimentation, of text-based work that kind of pushed at conceptual ideas. Just as WOW Cafe Theatre was a spiritual home to Carmelita, as Judson Poets Theatre was for [Carmelita’s teacher] Maria Irene Fornés, Soho Rep has been my version of that. Those spaces have made different kinds of work that looked different, operated differently, and played by different games of what was experimental at the time, but through this collaboration, we’ve felt this continuity between these spaces, these generations, and the art made in them.”
The upcoming production will also have co-scenic design by Mimi Lien and Tatiana Kahvegian, costume and props design by Greg Corbino, lighting design by Barbara Samuels, co-sound and video design by Tei Blow and Jeremy Kadetsky, and casting by Stephanie Yankwitt, Nia Smith, and Tanis Parenteau of tbd casting co.
Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! was developed with support from the Creative Capital Foundation.
Additional details of Soho Rep’s 2024-2025 season, the first programmed by its new artistic leaders Caleb Hammons and Ting, will be announced later in September. In 2025, the company will take up temporary residence at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater, where Soho Rep will produce the majority of its work for the next few years.
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