AGAINST THE CURRENT

"Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!," at Soho Rep, and "Gatz," at the Public.

- HELEN SHAW

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 Cubanborn 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 on the theatre’s board.

Troyano plays herself, a pugnacious bantam with short hair dyed tennisball green, while the mischievous Ugo Chukwu is cast as Branden, snug in a checkered cardigan and an air of wry self-regard. (Greg Corbino designed the costumes.) A secondary character describes him as “a handsome African American millennial homosexual— with attitude,” and we sense the real Jacobs-Jenkins somewhere peeking at us, to see how we take it.