Review: 'Gordo' is a refreshing breeze
By Judith Egerton
jegerton@courier-journal.com
Courier-Journal Critic
Carly Mensch.
It's a name to remember.
The 24-year-old New York playwright has made a precocious debut with her warm and hopeful comedy, "All Hail Hurricane Gordo," at the Humana Festival of New American Plays.
The play premiered Saturday at Actors Theatre of Louisville and will continue at various times through the end of the month.
The title refers to a 20-something, emotionally damaged character named Gordo. He rams into walls, wrestles his older brother, Chaz, and can't hold a job. He's also exuberant, creative, and painfully needy. He wears pajamas and calls himself "a force of nature."
It's Mensch who is a force of nature. Her tidily crafted, two-act play (energetically directed by Actors' associate director Sean Daniels) involves four well-drawn, very different characters.
Within this mostly light-hearted play about change and maturity, she weaves threads of mystery and serious issues of family responsibility. Daniels and his charming cast do a fine job delivering Mensch's likable, uncomplicated (but not simplistic) work about two brothers stuck in a rut of dependency.
On Paul Owen's set in the Pamela Brown Auditorium, a clutter of clothes and papers look as if they've been swept by a strong wind underneath a faded vinyl couch that's been repaired with duct tape.
Nearby, Chaz (Matthew Dellapina) types letters on a desk stacked with phone books. On the other side of the room, a rickety card table with an umbrella as a fourth leg holds an odd assortment of things, including comic books, a bingo set and swimming goggles. You might say they are artifacts of an arrested childhood.
They belong to Gordo (Patrick James Lynch), whose tenuous mental health make him dependent on the well-meaning Chaz, who does his best to hold their household together.
The force of change comes in the form of a spirited young woman named India (Tracee Chimo), who rents a room from the brothers. Her presence and the later arrival of her father (William McNulty) force Gordo to grow up and allow Chaz to imagine options and make choices.
Mensch, whose surname in Yiddish means a person of integrity and compassion, has endowed her brothers with those very characteristics. And like Chaz and Gordo, Mensch's future is promising.
At a time when the world seems overwhelmingly troubled, "All Hail Hurricane Gordo" blows into the Humana Festival with a confident and idealistic new voice in American theater.
