"The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana

For longtime frequenters of the downtown New York theatre scene, Carmelita Tropicana is a household name. In her decades-long career as a performance artist, actor, author, and teacher, she has built a body of work that alloys raucous humor and fantastical role play—with the help of a roster of memorable personas and characters—to interrogate the entanglements of queerness, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. As she toured her work across the country, collecting a raft of honors and awards along the way, she reached a wider audience still when her work was profiled by José Esteban Muñoz, whose book Disidentifications regularly introduces Tropicana to generations of theatre and performance scholars who might not otherwise experience the joy of seeing her perform live.

At the end of 2024, her show Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! opened at Soho Rep, a collaboration with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whom Tropicana taught and mentored while he was a graduate student at NYU. The play is, at once, a fantastical odyssey into the canon of one of our most beloved performance artists and a nostalgic love letter to the avant-garde performance ecology in which she continues to figure so prominently. The central conceit is as provocative as it is simple: Tropicana (playing herself) contemplates retiring her iconic persona, so Jacobs-Jenkins (played by Ugo Chukwu) offers to buy her. But such a persona can hardly be contained by so bald a commercial transaction. As Carmelita transfers from body to body, the stage gives way to a phantasmagoric dreamscape populated by Tropicana’s alter-egos, mentors, and heroes—until Carmelita finally comes home to roost, gloriously embodied by Tropicana again at last, in a direct-address coda that changes with each performance.

Tropicana invited me to talk about the play with her at the Park Avenue Armory, where she and Jacobs-Jenkins share a studio as artists in residence.

This interview was conducted on April 25, 2025. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Alex Ferrone: I want to talk about Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, of course, which I loved, but I thought we might start at the end.

Carmelita Tropicana: The end!

AF: (Laughs) Yes, because I was so moved by the ending of the show. I saw it the day after Nikki Giovanni passed away, and you ended the show by reading her poem “Nikki-Rosa.” There was something special about remembering her that way and inviting the audience into this collective mourning—and celebration too. I wondered why that poem specifically, why this invocation of Black love as Black wealth.

CT: Well, it’s such a beautiful poem. She’s really known for it. It just states things in such an uplifting way. Like, this is what it is, and they don’t understand. They’re trying to speak for us, but they can’t possibly know. If you’re white, I’m not sure you can know what it really is to be Black in America. So, here’s somebody who was really important as a queer artist—and it was really beautiful, that poem, and what it meant—so, you know, I felt she needed to be remembered in a really good way.

AF: You did that.

CT: I wanted the show to end with a coda from Carmelita, because all throughout the play, I’m not Carmelita. Other people are Carmelita. But at the very end, I am fully in my body as Carmelita, and I can address the audience. And the coda is always different. It changes. Whatever happens during that day or that week, I point it out. I will remember.

There was another director who died, David Schweizer, who had directed one of my pieces, the Cucaracha piece [With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/Con que culo se sienta la cucaracha?], and he also directed me and Marga Gomez in Single Wet Female. He saw the show maybe three weeks before he passed away, and he was just beaming. And that’s the image I have of David. Like this. (She beams) He was queer from the very beginning, you know? All his animal prints—he was always in animal prints. Always. And he was beaming. Sometimes people can be kind of jealous when others do well, but there was none of that. There was just generosity. There was just happiness at having seen the show. In fact, he told Marga that she had to come see the show. She had to come to New York. And that’s the image I have of David. So, I also mentioned him in one of my codas. It was like a memorial for him. To me, that’s important: to remember people as we’re going along.

AF: This ties into something I hoped to talk about, which is the importance of queer genealogies and mentorship. It’s such a big part of the show. I mean, the fact that there’s a picture of Branden right there on the table! (Points to the framed photograph of Jacobs-Jenkins on the opposite end of the table.) I think the concept of mentorship means something particular among queer people, those kinds of intergenerational queer connections or mentor–mentee relationships. While I was watching the show, I thought a lot about my own mentor, Darren Gobert, who lived and worked in New York in the late nineties and early aughts, who was so enmeshed in that performance culture. I knew the show would land for him in such a special way, since he’d spent so much time in that space—Soho Rep specifically and just downtown New York theatre in general. And now here I was sitting in that space too, and I couldn’t wait to talk to him about it.

CT: That’s important. You have to pass things on.

AF: There are multiple generations of queer mentorship within the play. You were a student of María Irene Fornés, and she appears as a character. Branden was a student of yours, and he appears as a character—in addition to co-creating the show with you. What was it like working on this with a former student, now no longer as mentor and mentee but as collaborators?

CT: (In unison) Collaborators. It’s very different. The world changes, you know. He was no longer the student that I met in 2007. He can’t be, and neither am I, so it’s very different. It’s more like colleagues coming together and trying to figure it out. We said we were going to work on something in 2015. Now, from 2015 to 2024, that’s a lot of years in between, and we were busy with other things. He was busy with his work, I was busy with mine, and then COVID happened too. There were a lot of intervening years, you know, where things happened, so we both grow. You know, you change, and we are no longer who we were before. His feet are also in the Broadway world now.¹

We really started working on the play in 2016 because that’s when we got a grant. When you get a grant, it’s sort of like, okay, you gotta do it.² We began by looking at the film My Dinner with Andre. That was where we started: it was going to be much more of a conversation, that sort of script. And then it went through different iterations. First, there was going to be a BJJ character, but it was going to be him on stage with me. It was going to be a conversation, the two of us. But he was not interested in performing at all. At all. I mean, eight shows a week, no. And he’s right. He had a lot of other commissions, and in the interim period he became a father—there were a lot of different things. So we began one way, and then the show went a very different way. But I became much more involved with Soho Rep. We’re both board members at Soho Rep, which is where he did An Octoroon.

AF: Yes, of course.

CT: That was really wonderful. That’s what really catapulted his career, so in a way it’s been his home for a long time. I came to Soho Rep because I saw a play in 2008, directed by Sarah Benson, and it was like, oh my god. It was so amazing and so weird and so not anything that I would do.

AF: Was it [Sarah Kane’s] Blasted?

CT: Yes!

AF: I’ve only seen a recording. Such an excellent, iconic production.

CT: Not the type of work I do at all, but it was really important, and I thought, well, I’ve got to come to this theatre again. And I was very happy I did. Not that I love everything, but everything is done in a certain theatrical way that’s thoughtful. So even if I see something and don’t necessarily like it, there’s always something there that makes it worth it.

AF: There’s a real meditation in Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! on the future of downtown, experimental theatre culture. I mean, we all knew this was the last ever Soho Rep show in that space.³

CT: Exactly.

AF: That must have felt really meaningful.

CT: Oh yeah, it was. When they told us that we were going to close the space, it was like, whoa, we’re going to close this. You know, it was very—(She gestures)—for everybody working there, because it wasn’t just our show. Mimi Lien, who had done sets for Soho Rep, people who were working there from before that have a history, that are attached, that have a real feeling for the space and what it was like. It was this dumpy place where magic happened. Such magic.

AF: The play asks, at a certain point, what does downtown New York theatre mean now? It’s a shift I imagine you’ve observed firsthand over the last few decades. How do you feel about the culture of downtown experimental theatre, whether now or looking toward the future?

CT: I think there’s still “downtown” theatre. Back when I was starting out, it was “experimental”—there are still shows that are very experimental. What has happened is that, geographically, they used to be just downtown. The space of downtown, from 14th Street all the way to Tribeca: that was it. But now it’s expanded to different boroughs because—what’s affordable? Where can people live? Where can theatres be that’s cheaper? Where does the young population go that will come see the shows? So all of that is taken into account.

I just saw Rheology by [Shayok] Misha Chowdhury, who actually just had a show at Soho Rep called Public Obscenities, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Rheology was wonderful. It still has the sensibility of downtown, but he’s doing it at Bushwick Starr, all the way in Brooklyn.

AF: (Laughs) Ah yes, all the way.

CT: All the way, you know! It’s a beautiful play, and it’s him and his mother. It’s really very touching, and again it has that sensibility. That’s Misha.⁴

But then you have people like Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte, who did a show at Soho Rep called Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken [Present It’s That Time of the Month], where you have to go through a vagina to get to your seat. It was wonderful and almost a nod to the eighties, sort of a talk show format interacting with the audience, and they had people coming up that were guest stars. I was one of the guest stars.

AF: Oh, that’s amazing.

CT: And I loved it. I really didn’t answer any of the questions, so Becca went like this. (Mimes throwing cue cards over her shoulder) I hadn’t performed in so long, and I just really wanted to talk about certain things—like, you know, a sexual workshop I had attended with Betty Dodson, the masturbation guru, and my research on hyenas, which are a matriarchal species that I find fascinating. I mixed it up. I even had a costume. And Becca was like, well, let’s do it. They were really very generous. They were great. And at the end of the show, Becca closed with a stand-up routine that was beautiful, touching, dark, hysterically funny—and that’s still very much, in my opinion, downtown-ish experimental-type theatre.

AF: So, you see this sensibility still, but it’s not limited to this or that place the way we sometimes talk about it.

CT: Club culture is like this. There’s still club culture—in Brooklyn, all over the place, kids doing drag. You know, I’m less likely to go to a rave or go to a club at 10 or 11—I used to, but it’s less me now—so I haven’t seen what kids are doing, but there’s all kinds of stuff.

AF: Well, there were a lot of young people in the audience at Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! 

CT: Which is great. I love it. That’s the audience I want. I know I can get the others, but I want that one.

AF: And it was a vocal young audience. They were responding really enthusiastically to the show. I was fascinated by the pop that José Muñoz got every time he was mentioned. You know, in my case, I first encountered your work through Muñoz, through theory. And I wonder if that’s also true for a lot of young people, college students.

CT: José is having quite a renaissance, let me tell you. And he has been there throughout it all because, in the academy, he’s a queer icon. What’s really great is that we were friends for a long time. We were friends from the moment we met. It was like, oh my god, because he’s funny. He was funny. No, he is. He was, he is, he was, he is. He was really funny. And he did not believe in high or low culture. He loved everything. He was brilliant. And his parties were amazing. I was at Wesleyan once and I started talking about the parties José gave, and that’s all the queer students wanted to hear about.

AF: I want to hear about it!

CT: José would have these salons that were just amazing, and it was all about connecting people. José is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of my life. Because a lot of the people that I know come through José. In the eighties, I met a lot of my friends through WOW [Café Theater]. Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Maureen Angelos of the Five Lesbian Brothers, Split Britches—Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Deb Margolin—all those people that I met through WOW, they’re still my friends. But in the nineties and into the aughts, it was through José. José was the connector.

AF: I’m interested in the relationship between theory and performance when you have an audience that is so plugged into theory, which I wouldn’t say is the case for most audiences. The average theatregoer isn’t necessarily up on performance studies. But your audiences are, which I suspect gives you a different kind of grist to work with.

CT: You know, I never started with theory. In fact, I didn’t read a lot of stuff that José wrote because I’m superstitious. Like, if I read it, then I’m just going to do that. But over time that changed. At some points, I would be stuck, and I would go, let me see what José wrote about me, because you can mine that stuff. So, the theory is there. I’m not a theorist. I’m not going to talk theory. That’s not where I come from. But I like that it exists in the world, that people are looking at it, because it’s about ideas.

AF: A lot of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! takes place in what the show calls “phantasmagoria”—this dreamscape, which is also kind of an archive, a repository of images, and it explodes onto the stage. Talk me through how you ultimately chose that space—or infinite space, in a way—to work through the ideas of the play.

CT: Well, I’m a persona. I mean, I have a persona. (Laughs) I have a persona. I started from the point of view of what it means to have a persona, why we have them, why we take them on. I was trying to figure out this world of personas—they’re characters but they are also real—and I was thinking of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, characters who maybe don’t want to be in your show, who are fighting for agency. That’s where it started for me.

AF: I found those sequences so exciting because of the accumulation of all these traces of performances—characters you’ve played, objects we’ve encountered but that crop up again, but now they mean something new. That kind of resignification feels very queer to me.

CT: Which one are you thinking of? I’m curious.

AF: In terms of objects, the plunger is one of those iconic images.

CT: Yes, and that comes from Jack Smith, so it has that lineage. It’s like Duchamp and the urinal, taking an ordinary object and just elevating it. Jack Smith did that to me. I’ll never see a plunger the same way again. Caleb [Hammons], one of the producers, actually made for me little plunger earrings—so then it becomes something else again.

I love the visuals of a work. Like, if I don’t have an outfit… (Laughs) I know it’s vapid, but Carmelita has to have an outfit. And once I have an outfit, it’s like, yes, I’m dressed for the party. My sister [Ella Troyano] made a film called Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen. In the very beginning, I’m wearing a rainbow-colored dress that Uzi Parnes designed that has fruited boas—he did the production design and the costumes for the film. When I come out in Phantasmagoria, I’m wearing a belt with bananas on it—which are not just Carmen Miranda but also Josephine Baker. Things that reference people who are important to Carmelita’s persona.

AF: Again, it’s those genealogies, right?

CT: I had to explain the bananas to somebody the other day. They were young and they weren’t familiar with it.

AF: I think a lot of young queer people right now will probably associate bananas with a drag queen called Nymphia Wind.

CT: Oh my god, I love Nymphia!

AF: The bananas live on.

CT: I love her. She’s “downtown” weird. And so absurd and playful.

AF: Playfulness is underrated, isn’t it? It’s not taken as seriously as it should be.

CT: Exactly. Humor is serious, just couched in a different way.

AF: There’s also a lot in the play that’s actually really poignant. I’m thinking of [the character] Branden’s speech at the end of the show, which is kind of a mournful reflection on youth. On being at a point in your life when you’re looking backwards and forwards at the same time, filled with uncertainty.

CT: Branden’s monologue is very moving. I had no idea that this play could make people cry.

AF: (Raises hand) It did.

CT: When you’re doing something, you’re hoping to move people, but you don’t know what effect you’re going to have.

AF: Part of that final speech, too, is thinking about what young theatre makers are doing today, which is where the play ends before Carmelita closes the show with the coda. Are you excited about what young queer theatre makers are doing now and the kinds of things they’re experimenting with?

CT: Oh yeah, absolutely. There was another play at Soho Rep called Wolf Play [by Hansol Jung], and it really got to me. It was from a very different perspective, told with a puppet, and it really worked. I saw it twice. It worked and it was very moving. I haven’t been as involved in plays that have puppets, but this really worked for me. So, I am excited. There’s a new generation that’s coming up and doing great work.

AF: I want to pick up on something we discussed at the top, which is the importance of solidarity. You referred to the line in Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me,” which I think says there’s a limit to how much you can understand the experiences of another person or another community that’s not your own.

CT: I think that’s a kind of a dialectic that’s going to go back and forth. So, no, you can’t. But maybe at some point, yes, you can. And it really depends on being sensitive about how you speak. The world changes and you evolve. I changed a word in Milk of Amnesia when I learned more about the history. Now, is that censorship? Am I censoring myself? No, I don’t think so. I’m being careful about certain words. Words are important.

AF: The discourse is evolving all the time, so we’re constantly going to be making those kinds of adjustments.

CT: Which is not a bad thing. And sometimes maybe we do too much, sure, so then there’s the self-correcting, but, you know, we’re figuring it out.

AF: That’s productive, though. I think that gesture is so meaningful. Like, we’re working on it. As a community—or as a community of communities—we can work together and try to figure it out. We need that coalition-building more than ever, that kind of collaboration and solidarity.

CT: Yes, I totally agree. There are ways that we’re going to be different from another person, and there are ways that we are similar. Sometimes the stakes are different. But your stakes are important to me, and my stakes are important to you. And then we have a lot of stakes in common as well. There’s something really hopeful in that.