Soho Rep to Close Out 33 Years in Tribeca with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!

Tony Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will pen the final play to be produced at Soho Rep's home of 33 years, 46 Walker Street. Jacobs-Jenkins will open the company's 2024-25 season with Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! just ahead of Soho Rep's temporary move to Playwrights Horizons' 128-seat Peter Jay Sharp Theater—a space-sharing partnership that will be in place for the next two to three years while Soho Rep searches for its next permanent home. 

Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! is a collaboration between downtown performance artist Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana) and Jacobs-Jenkins, who earned a Tony Award earlier this year for the Broadway revival of his family drama Appropriate. The production will star Tropicana and reunite Jacobs-Jenkins with OBIE Award-winning director Eric Ting (The Comeuppance). In this lecture/play/performance, Alina calls up her former student Branden to share some bad news: She’s killing off Carmelita Tropicana, the iconic performance persona that she’s lived and breathed for 30 years. Branden’s response is only one question: “How much for her?” Performances will run from October 23 through December 1. 

The remaining productions of Soho Rep's 2024-25 season will be announced in September. Programmed by its new artistic leaders, Caleb Hammons and Eric Ting, the season will include the first production in the Sharp Theater set for February 2025, a new Writer Director Lab cohort, three new commissions and a series of events in January 2025 for Soho Rep’s community to pay homage to 46 Walker Street. The season will end with a co-production between Soho Rep and Playwrights Horizons, beginning performances in May.

Soho Rep has been in its 46 Walker Street space since 1991. The space has suffered from perennial electrical and plumbing failures and ongoing water damage, along with other problems that have cost Soho Rep tens of thousands of dollars yearly, disrupted technical rehearsals and impacted the quality of experience for casts and crews. The venue is also not fully accessible, limiting Soho Rep’s ability to serve disabled audiences and artists. In 2022, the building changed hands from a single-building landlord to a corporate real estate holding company—a significant inflection point for the organization. “Soho Rep is not a building: It is a constellation of values that have long governed its approach to an artist-centered, artist-led investigation of our collective humanity," said Soho Rep Director Cynthia Flowers in a statement. "The loss of a building can impact an organization adversely, but so can holding on to one for too long.”