Gogol's 'Inspector General' by Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (second review)

The uncredited translation from the Russian used by director Tina Brock feels wordy and clunky, despite how her busy ensemble (ten actors playing 21 roles) barrels through with gusto. Andrew Carroll shines in the title role — except that he really isn’t the government inspector. Once the mayor (Jack Tamburri) and citizens assume he’s the dreaded official whom a letter foretold (fortunately, the postman reads everyone’s mail), they fawn over him.

Carroll plays the hapless young man like a whirling dervish who, stranded and starving due to gambling debts, sees their mistake as his opportunity. Since the corrupt always assume that everyone else is equally corrupt, the town’s leaders are happy to shower him with gifts, loans, bribes, and even a daughter in marriage and/or some fun with her mother, in order to protect them from even higher officials.

Questions of relevance

In an intermissionless 110 minutes, this begins to feel repetitive, and our attention lags. The play’s farcical build is logical and inevitable, and thus not particularly engaging, and its satire too distant to really affect us, even given where we live, even in an election year. I wonder if a fresh translation might make the story more relevant to American culture or, at least, more palatable to modern ears.

Brock’s use of Alexandre Desplat’s music from Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel keeps the tone more fanciful and farcical. She uses the music as underscoring, much it is used in a film, which usually doesn’t work well in theater but has a buoyant quality here that also, alas, contributes to that feeling of irrelevance.

Fanciful fake hair

Her talented designers — Lisi Stoessel (set), Janus Stefanowicz (costumes), and Maria Shaplin (lights) — have a lot of fun with the scenario. Stoessel’s flat wall of fanciful playing-cardlike paintings includes ten doors of varying sizes for much Laugh-In style silliness. The period costumes, including a lot of fanciful fake facial hair, allow Francesca Piccioni, Jennifer MacMillan, and Christina May to play men as well as women with quick changes.

Along with Paul McElwee, Bob Schmidt, and Thomas Dura, they create an entire village mob panicked that their unbridled corruption will end. They’re all adept at the play’s many asides to the audience and their characters’ melodramatic outbursts of false piety.

IRC’s The Government Inspector is undeniably bright, colorful, and fun. But as a play purporting to have some substance, it comes off as lightweight, despite the clear line from this provincial town’s petty tyrants to today’s equivalents like our do-nothing Pennsylvania State Legislature and our “Porngate” judges. I’m not sure how these connections might be drawn, but there could be much devious fun in the attempt.

For A.J. Sabatini’s review, click here.