An Actor Wins World War II at GALA
By • September 17, 2026 0 192
Playing through Sunday, Sept. 27, at GALA Hispanic Theatre in Columbia Heights, “Garbo: The Actor Who Saved the World” isn’t about Greta Garbo, though the enigmatic screen goddess inspired the unlikely hero’s code name.
A world premiere directed by Carlos Celdrán, “Garbo” is the delightful opening production of the company’s 51st season. While the Spanish-language play — described as “a psychological mystery based on a true story” — is largely comic, Artistic Director Gustavo Ott crafted it from serious source material.
As always, English supertitles are provided. Appearing on three screens, Heather McKay’s very natural translation makes the show easy to follow for non-Spanish-speaking audience members. Also due to its World War II subject matter, “Garbo” is an excellent choice for first-time GALA-goers.
At the start of the play, we meet a grandfather and a granddaughter at home in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1984. She teases him about his monotonous, if quirky, daily routine. (The original title of the play, which premiered at the Teatro San Martín de Caracas in 2013, was “El Hombre más aburrido del Mundo,” meaning “The Most Boring Man in the World.”)
The first shoe drops when his son enters with the message that British Embassy officials are at the door asking for him. He wants nothing to do with them; when told they are inviting him to be honored by the queen, he insists he is not the person they are looking for. But he is.
After indignantly denying everything, he calls a family meeting to reveal his past and come to a decision about accepting the honor.
The play proceeds as a series of flashbacks, with every role — nearly 20 — taken by the cast of six. Only the charismatic Kevin Jorges portrays a single character, Garbo, the grandfather of the opening scene. At the other extreme, company member Delbis Cardona juggles six parts.
In fact, the play’s central theme is the nature of fictional characters: those we “play” in our daily life, consciously or subconsciously; those portrayed by actors and spies; and those invented by playwrights, novelists and born storytellers like Garbo.
In the 1930s, we learn, the grandfather was a young actor in Barcelona named Juan Pujol. He tries to connect with poet, playwright and director Federico García Lorca, who is assassinated in 1936. Caught up in the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, and in financial straits, Pujol offers his services to British intelligence and, rebuffed, to the Axis, which expresses interest.
“It’s the Nazis and it’s for you, Juan,” says his frantic wife, Arceli, having taken the call. “Oh God, the Devil always says yes.”
Though, as the play notes, the marriage doesn’t survive the events of the war, the couple’s lively interaction onstage — including a scene in which, stuck in Lisbon, they brainstorm and banter — she barefoot, he bare-chested — portrays their relationship as devoted and passionate.
The sole woman in the cast, Clara Navarro handily plays three parts: the granddaughter, Araceli and U.S. Army liaison Sara Bishop, a character invented by Ott, swapping out several costumes (designed by Rukiya Henry-Fields).
Garbo’s father, who haunts him like Hamlet’s, voices the play’s second theme: the tension between the active and passive life. Though the word “actor” ought to mean “one who acts,” the Shakespearean term “player” seems more fitting. What good is an actor in a war? “Has algo!” (“Do something!”), his father implores.
Like Navarro, company member Carlos Castillo role-switches impressively, in his case between Garbo’s father and MI5 officer Thomas Harris. (Arabel to the Nazis, Pujol takes on the movie star’s name when he becomes a British double agent.)
Harris was a real person, chosen as Garbo’s handler because he had a Spanish mother and an English father. Knowing that, hearing him converse with Garbo in fluent Spanish, without reference to any communication difficulties, makes sense. It is, however, somewhat startling to hear Eisenhower, played by Mauricio Gómez Amoretti (who also plays, more convincingly, Garbo’s Nazi handler Federico), and Hitler, who briefly appears, played by Geovanni Felicier, speaking Spanish.
The play’s third theme, which unites the first two, is how few of us even try to be the individual we are capable of being, the one we are in some sense “meant” to be.
“That is the contemporary echo of the show,” Ott explained in a Broadway World Q&A, “the idea that rarely, and few people, can fulfill their vocation. The idea that imagination is the last area of freedom, and theater as a vehicle of that imagination.”
“You should have written for the theater,” says Araceli, astounded by her husband’s verbal fabrications. “That’s what I’m doing,” he replies.
After a few coincidentally prophetic made-up reports, the Nazi command finds his expanding network of nonexistent Axis-supporting subagents so credible that Garbo requests and is sent substantial sums to maintain it. Garbo’s unmatched ability to create characters out of thin air turns out to be essential to the Allied victory, part of an elaborate D-Day disinformation effort.
All the action of the play is carried out on a pleasingly simple set, designed by Jessica Cancino, with lighting design by Hailey LaRoe. The locations and time periods are projected on a beam. Designed by Luis García, large black-and-white projections on the back wall, most powerfully of World War II film footage, serve as windows on the world beyond the minimally furnished rooms the characters inhabit.
Original music by Koki Lortkipanidze is effectively used throughout for transitions and underscoring. Abstract in character, a mix of synthetic throbs and drones, tinkling and distorted piano and percussion — later becoming more orchestral and incorporating the sounds of electronic transmissions, marching, machine guns and explosions — it gives the production a captivating contemporary edge.
As a (very prolific) playwright, the Caracas-born Ott, who became GALA’s artistic director in 2024, is both a philosopher and a wit. Most of the humor came through clearly in translation, though there were a few jokes about Catalans and Galicians that went over my head.
The cast’s national origins vary. Venezuelan Jorges and Spanish Navarro both live in Madrid. Amoretti is Venezuelan, Castillo and Cardona Venezuelan American, Felicier Puerto Rican. Celdrán, the director, is Cuban.
Founded by Hugo and Rebecca Read Medrano in 1976, GALA (Grupo de Artistas LatinoAmericanos) occupied spaces in Adams Morgan, Penn Quarter, Shaw and Columbia Heights before moving into what had been the balcony of the Tivoli Theatre, a 1924 movie house, in 2005. Past Dave’s Hot Chicken, one ascends to the box office and bar on the second floor, then up a short flight to the theater, which seats about 250.
Garbo: The Actor Who Saved the World
Through Sept. 27
GALA Hispanic Theatre, 3333 14th St. NW
