I have little appetite to spend the next four years gloomily referencing current events in my reviews, so let’s get this out of the way. It was a massive relief to spend an evening soon after the Presidential election in a different era. Not necessarily a more innocent time, just one where artistic risk was the norm, and cultural production was not impoverished by AI, IP, or social media. The period? Could be the 1980s or ’90s, when downtown performance art was in high ferment. Or maybe it’s 2007, when theater kid Branden Jacobs-Jenkins took Alina Troyano’s NYU class. Troyano’s outrageous, longtime alter ego is Carmelita Tropicana, a Carmen Miranda-like gender satirist and social critic prone to wearing campy, trash-glam outfits and barking rapidly in a thick Cuban accent. Through Troyano, Jacobs-Jenkins became smitten with the romance of the old East Village, its anarchy, its queer aesthetic freedom. However, life would take him from performance art to being one of his generation’s most celebrated playwrights (e.g., Appropriate). The endearingly loony Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! represents the fusion of Troyano’s decades-long practice, and Jacobs-Jenkins’s vicarious nostalgia for his mentor’s world.

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