Freedom of MacDowell yields "anarchic" new play for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins & Alina Troyano

“A kind of anarchic catalogue raisonné” is how New Yorker critic and MacDowell Fellow Helen Shaw (14) described Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, a new play by Fellows Alina Troyano (16) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (3x 12-16), “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.”

The play’s world premiere production at Soho Rep. has extended twice after raves from across the New York press and sold out shows. With autobiographical elements from both playwrights, the work is about two artists, one a former star student of the other (Jacobs-Jenkins was Troyano’s student at N.Y.U.), and the fantastical adventure that begins when the student offers to buy the teacher’s alter ego.

“The show is a trippy love letter,” wrote Sara Holdren in Vulture, “the kind of wily, ingenious, slightly unhinged delight that pulls back the curtain on what theater really is: simultaneously a silly game and an inherently political act in which a bunch of kids, some young, some old, try on personas like feather boas, making shit up, making a mess, making worlds.”

Troyano would seem to find some of that energy at MacDowell when she and Jacobs-Jenkins were developing the play together during their 2016 residencies.

“MacDowell provided a space that gave me a freedom to play and experiment I have not experienced before; it bolstered my artistic confidence,” she wrote after the time she spent working in Nef Studio. “It was a luxury to live in a studio in the woods and concentrate on the work. At MacDowell I forged a deeper bond personally and professionally with Branden, who lived nearby at Calderwood. Our work sessions were productive and made all the more enjoyable surrounded by woods, at times sitting by the fireside, reading, writing, discussing texts, and experimenting with props and costumes. […] This was my first residency at an organization like MacDowell. I have only attended short project-based theater residencies with a set structure with the ultimate goal of a reading or presentation of the work.”

Directed by Eric Ting, and with set design by MacDowell Fellow Mimi Lien (12) and Tatiana Kahvegian, Soho Rep.’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! ran from October 24 to December 22, 2024.

Read about other new works supported by MacDowell Fellowships.

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