Facebook X Email Print Save Story It may be bright and getting brighter on Broadway these days, but Off Broadway the shadows are lengthening. Desperation-level real-estate pressures are pushing established theatre companies out of spaces that have long been part of the city’s fabric—I keep going to shows and realizing that I’ll never be inside a certain venue again. It’s particularly gutting that the scrappy Soho Rep is leaving Walkerspace, a tiny storefront conversion in Tribeca, its home since 1991.
Several of the most important shows of the past decades premièred in the sixty-five-seat shoebox, including Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview” and Anne Washburn’s “10 Out of 12.” To bid the cramped, magical old space farewell, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Cuban-born performance artist Alina Troyano have co-written the elegiac farce “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!” It’s a bantering conversation between two longtime friends—Jacobs-Jenkins, a Tony Award-winning playwright, was Troyano’s student in 2007, at N.Y.
U.—and a kind of anarchic catalogue raisonné, in which Troyano’s most famous stage alter ego, Carmelita Tropicana, summons a living inventory of three and a half decades of radical (and radically queer) performance work. For Jacobs-Jenkins, the show is a homecoming; his gleefully deconstructed melodrama “An Octoroon,” produced at Soho Rep in 2014, made his reputation.
Both he and Troyano are now o.
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