“Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!” and “Gatz” Beat On Against the Current

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 on the theatre’s board.

Troyano plays herself, a pugnacious bantam with short hair dyed tennis-ball 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.

Habitat loss is the play’s inciting crisis. Troyano’s gigs are drying up as downtown venues close. Branden, flush with cash from a “peak TV” deal, offers to buy the Carmelita persona rather than see it disappear. The transfer of intellectual property quickly turns metaphysical: after assorted mayhem involving a bust of the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carmelita possesses Branden, pushing his consciousness into a limbo populated by other Troyano characters, from a “Cuban mansplainer” to a saucy cockroach newswoman.

The show, directed with velocity by Eric Ting and liberally sprinkled with puppets, surreal dance breaks, and other experimental-theatre mainstays, sways like an unsecured scenery flat. I mean that as a compliment—or at least as a way of describing my pleasure in the deliberately confusing and unfinished. There are moments of sheer comic bliss, often thanks to Chukwu’s dry delivery or the chaos agent Will Dagger, a Muppet-y menace in a mustache, who plays several characters, including a vengeful, scene-stealing goldfish. (Corbino builds him incredible fish puppets of increasing size.) Sometimes artistic strategies do rub against each other. Troyano, a veteran of rowdy, hybrid spaces, fills conceptual lacunae by pouring in energy; Jacobs-Jenkins likes to retreat to an ironic distance, to let us do the work ourselves.

We often feel the latter’s amused gaze on us as we watch: Branden gives a late speech about the experimental performances he saw as a younger man, which were full of “ideas and ingenuity and curiosity and wonder and interesting failure.” He neatly forestalls any quibbles we might have with this show by explicitly connecting it to a galvanizing, process-oriented past. The evening concludes with Carmelita reinhabiting Troyano, whose charisma blinks on like a searchlight. She prowls along the front row: “Have you ever touched a lesbian performance artist before?” she asks, laughing. The night I saw it, the feeling in the room was ecstatic, and, for an instant, the piece felt like the beginning rather than the end of something.

This is a season of farewells. Over at the Public, Elevator Repair Service is mounting a final New York staging of its masterpiece, the marathon “Gatz,” from 2010. If you somehow missed the original, or one of several return engagements, the production features a man (Scott Shepherd) in a gray office reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” as he and his workmates drift into position and then into character. From the first line (“In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice”), Shepherd becomes Nick, the novel’s narrator; others play Daisy (Tory Vazquez), Tom (Pete Simpson), Jay Gatsby (Jim Fletcher), and the rest. It takes about six hours to get through every word of the 1925 text, and, with intermissions plus your dinner break, you wind up putting in a full day with the company. It’s not work, though. “Gatz” may be the world’s least likely blockbuster show, but there’s no doubt that it is one. The defining nonmusical production of the twenty-tens, it provides an all too relevant observation of heedless decadence, while the performance itself, given its patience and duration, restores to its viewers a deep focus that modern life has made more and more difficult to sustain.

In 2004, when the director John Collins and his company started presenting the show in workshop, the Fitzgerald estate wasn’t particularly keen. Bigger commercial interests had the rights. I saw an early, unlicensed staging of it, where the illicitness was part of the excitement. Now, of course, the novel’s copyright has expired, and dramatizations crowd the field. I’ve seen two musical adaptations this year alone: Kait Kerrigan, Nathan Tysen, and Jason Howland’s lurid “The Great Gatsby,” on Broadway, and “Gatsby,” Florence Welch, Thomas Bartlett, and Martyna Majok’s version, at A.R.T., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both shows emphasized ecstasy; both missed the green light for the trees. Without the astringency of Nick’s often contemptuous commentary, the story’s love plots sweeten into romantic schlock.

“Gatz,” on the other hand, is almost all astringency. For much of the show, Shepherd’s light, skimming voice seems to hold every word in quotation marks—and the audience at a distance. “Gatz” continually punctures illusion: even as party music plays, the crummy desks and computer stacks on Louisa Thompson’s set never turn into the dreaming spires of Long Island. Instead, we’re thrust back onto Fitzgerald’s words, specifically their shapes and rhythms, as they lap against one another, like waves in the Sound.

The glitzy musical dramatizations pretty much run out of juice when Gatsby gets shot. I guess they figure that the love triangle’s done, so what’s the point in continuing on. “Gatz,” though, has nearly an hour to go. And it’s at this point that the ironic tone shifts. Gatsby’s father, Henry C. Gatz (played with an arthritic tenderness by Ross Fletcher, the Gatsby actor Jim Fletcher’s actual father), comes out of the deep Midwest to see his boy buried. Gatz, Sr., keeps showing Nick a copy of “Hopalong Cassidy,” in which he found a to-do list written by his teen-age son before he went East. Gatz can’t stop marvelling over the reminder “Be better to parents.” Ross Fletcher stoops his huge shoulders and shakes his shaggy head. “He was reluctant to close the book,” Shepherd says.

The final twenty minutes consist of Shepherd, as Nick, looking out at us and musing on what he’s discovered about America, about the size of it, and about the way people from different parts of it can’t seem to fit with one another. Here’s where Fitzgerald’s writing lifts from its low seabird vantage over events into language that flies high up, taking in the continent. “Gatz” has accidentally become, like the production at Soho Rep, a treatise on time; E.R.S. created the work when its members were all close to the age of their characters, and now we get to see what the very play we’re watching has made of them. I’m not sure that the thirty-year-old character of Nick would have much sympathy for the coating of sorrow that now lies over this beautiful show, like dust on one of the office’s many ignored files. But it’s been twenty years that we’ve been listening to his story together, and he wouldn’t want us to forget what we’ve learned. ♦