
The Government Inspector
by Nikolai Gogol
The Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5
February 2 – 28, 2016
Directed by Tina Brock
Running time is approximately 115 minutes, with no intermission.

Set Design
Lisi Stoessel
Lighting Design
Maria Shaplin
Costume Design
Janus Stefanowicz
Assistant Costume Designer
Courtney Boches
Sound Design
Tina Brock
Technical Director
Scott Cassidy
Ways and Means Coordinator
Bob Schmidt
Stage Manager/Board Operator/Assistant Director/Fight Captain
Gil Johnson
Prop Design and Construction
Mark Williams & Tina Brock
Scenic Painting
Brooke Murray, Radha Vakharia & Lisi Stoessel
Set Construction
Scott Cassidy & Rob Edmondson
Russian Language Tsar
Gil Johnson
Soundtrack from The Grand Budapest Hotel by Alexandre
Desplat. Written and directed by Wes Anderson February 2016
Reviews
The Government Inspector (2016)
“...If you think, because of its historical context, that The Government Inspector’s theme of rampant graft and corruption is no longer relevant today, you haven’t been paying attention to local city politics or the current presidential campaign…the energetic ensemble keep the ridiculousness building and the laughs coming with their rapid-fire delivery, quick changes, over-the-top emotions…”
--by Debra Miller, DCMetro Theater Arts
The Government Inspector (2016)
Who's Corrupt?
“... animated, quick-step, rollicking production. The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium Players tie it all tightly together in the shoebox sized Walnut Street Studio 5 Theater...my only real complaint is that in Gogol’s time, as in ours, the official, conniving bastards never get what’s coming to them…”
--by AJ Sabatini, Broad Street Review
The Government Inspector (2016)
THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR (IRC): Corruption!
“...Brock chooses instead to let each line exist in the present, with its character believing that what they say is the closes possible thing to truth. If they are lying, they themselves barely have the faculties to realize it. The result is a production that forefronts Gogol’s surprising, desperate, hypnotizing dialogue…”
--by Julius Ferraro, Phindie
The Government Inspector (2016)
Satire Without a Clear Target
“...undeniably bright, colorful, and fun…”
--by Mark Cofta, The Broad Street Review
The Government Inspector (2016)
Director’s Notes
Welcome! The production concept for The Government Inspector came from a longstanding fascination with the films of Wes Anderson, specifically The Grand Budapest Hotel. His confections and those of Tim Burton are a source of artistic inspiration for me, as both most closely capture the highly idiosyncratic characters and world typical in many absurd plays. This production is indebted and in awe of their brilliance and the inspiration their art provides. The visual appeal of Anderson’s creations speaks to the rigidity, order and discipline necessary to create the backdrop for a world gone awry. Another hallmark of both filmmaker’s creations are their fun and fabulous film scores, many composed by awarding-winning French composer and orchestrator Alexandre Desplat. This production is scored with soundtrack from Budapest Hotel created by Desplat and music supervisor Randall Poster, who chose a balalaika, a three-stringed Russian instrument to establish the musical voice of the film.
“I think it speaks to evolving culture, it speaks to folklore, it speaks to this sort of mythical foreign identity that we were trying to channel,” said Poster, who co-produced the soundtrack album. “And there’s just sort of the magic of it. It’s a great sound and underused and works really nicely as a counterpart to some of the more sophisticated classical pieces.” Alexandre Desplat on creating film compositions: “I enjoy going from genre to genre, just as I like watching different genres of movies. I try to jump from a drama to a thriller to a biopic or a love story; it allows me to take chances in different territories.”
For The Government Inspector, we are fortunate to benefit from the artistry of set designer Lisi Stoessel, lighting designer Maria Shaplin and costume designer Janus Stefanowicz. Together they bring the specificity, nuance and understanding of all of the play’s themes in a grand and subtle way. As the IRC celebrates year #10 we are committed to taking big ideas to the stage in a way that hopefully allows us to laugh at often absurd world we inhabit and create, and to reflect on our place in the world, how we navigate, and the footprint we leave. The question we asked for The Government Inspector was, “what are the assumptions we make, the web we weave?”
Welcome to the Grand Budapest Hotel.
We hope you enjoy your stay
The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol
February 6, 2016
DCMetro Theater Arts
by Debra Miller
First performed in 1836, The Government Inspector–playwright Nikolai Gogol’s unrelenting farce on socio-political corruption in Imperial Russia–has long been considered an important precursor to Theater of the Absurd of the mid-20th century. Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, Philadelphia’s only company devoted exclusively to the absurdist genre, captures all the pandemonium of Gogol’s influential work in a madcap production with a serious message about the effects of government misconduct and the foolishness of human behavior.
Based on a true anecdote that renowned Russian writer Alexander Pushkin recounted to Gogol, the play is set in a provincial town anticipating the visit of an incognito inspector from the central government. When Ivan Khlestakov, a stranger from St. Petersburg, arrives in the village, the unsophisticated citizens and unscrupulous local officials mistake him for the high-ranking bureaucrat, and a chaotic comedy of errors ensues.
In her signature style of fast-paced high-decibel absurdity, Director Tina Brock brings hilarity to the mayhem, but also cogently exposes the folly and greed of the self-serving characters, as the panicked townsfolk ingratiate themselves to the presumed inspector–played with gusto by the irrepressible Andrew Carroll–in an attempt to convince him to overlook their misdeeds, incompetence, and mismanagement, while he delights in their flattery, encourages their bribes, and derides their stupidity (“What a bunch of cabbage heads!”).
Brock’s energetic ensemble, several of whom play multiple roles, keep the ridiculousness building and the laughs coming with their rapid-fire delivery, quick changes, over-the-top emotions, and the sprinkling of their speech with a pretentious use of French words, phrases, and (mis)pronunciations (by which Gogol lampooned the contemporary Russian taste for elevated French culture). Bob Schmidt and Tomas Dura, as local landowners Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, execute side-splitting bits of physical comedy, walking into doors and bumping into each other, with Schmidt, in his role as the postmaster Shpyokin, running nonsensical laps around the audience and across the stage. The terrific Paul McElwee, Jennifer MacMillan, and IRC newcomers Francesca Piccioni, Christina May, and Jack Tamburri, round out the zany cast of desperate sycophants, who finally realize that they’ve been duped when a gendarme (Brett Mapp) announces the imminent arrival of the real government inspector.
A colorful scenic design by Lisi Stoessel comprises an upstage wall decorated with illustrations from antique Russian playing cards and punctuated by hidden doors and windows through which the actors appear. Period-style costumes by Janus Stefanowicz define the characters’ locale, classes, and professions, and Brock’s sound design employs a background score from Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel, composed by Alexandre Desplat, to evoke an Eastern European tone.
If you think, because of its historical context, that The Government Inspector’s theme of rampant graft and corruption is no longer relevant today, you haven’t been paying attention to local city politics or the current presidential campaign.
Running Time: Approximately two hours, with no intermission.
The Government Inspector plays through Sunday, February 28, 2016, at Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, performing at the Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5 – 825 Walnut Street, 5th floor, in Philadelphia, PA. For tickets, call (215) 285-0472, or purchase them online.
February 6, 2016
Broad Street Review
Who's Corrupt?
by AJ Sabatini
Irresponsible civic leaders! Corrupt government insiders! Dirt-stupid farmers! Deluded youth! Small town cover-ups! Bribery! Pompous self-invention! Long unpronounceable names! Idiopathic, Ridiculopathy. And don’t blame the looking glass if your mug is crooked.
No, I am not referring to front page news, the presidential campaign, moronic sitcoms, American Hustle and The Big Short, Putin’s Russia, or your daily interactions with bureaucracies and your family. I am summing up the basic themes in Nikolai Gogol’s always relevant 1836 play, The Inspector General, which is given as much to do as can be done, and more, in this animated, quick-step, rollicking production. The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium Players tie it all tightly together in the shoebox sized Walnut Street Studio 5 Theater.
You probably know the plot, even if you have never seen the play. A provincial town not far from St. Petersburg is run by an ethically challenged, but bright, bombastic mayor and his cadre of crooked civic cronies: judge, physician, school inspector, charity warden, postmaster. They hear of the impending visit of a state inspector general and immediately conspire do the least right things possible to cover up their ongoing schemes —and then blatantly bribe him.
It soon becomes clear that everyone in the town is on the take and the so-called inspector general — a fashionably dressed, fatuous 23-year-old, ne’er-do-well son of an aristocrat — is neither a real inspector nor a stranger to the arts of the deal, fixes, or flirtation with the mayor’s wife and daughter. Invited to dance, he extends his palm, and the more it is greased, the greedier he grows, until he gets on his horse and gallops away.
A dancing mise en scène
Though it runs for almost two hours with no intermission, this production is so much fun that I never looked at my watch. Director Tina Brock (who also did the sound design and, with Mark Williams, the props) expertly choreographs the actors around the small stage. The sequences are neatly fitted with fast-gabbing, fluidly gesturing actors whose audience-aware grimacing and group poses create a mise en scène that dances like the interplay of syllables in the names of the characters: Luka Lukich Khlopov, Ivan Alexandrovich Khlestakov, Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky and his wife, Anna Andreevna. Fortunately, there is a servant named Osip — a sign of Gogol’s genius wit for punctuating the pretensions of patronymic over-identification. (Gogol was, by the way, Ukrainian, not Russian, a crucial distinction that is often overlooked.)
There are 21 characters in the production and, except for the mayor (Jack Tamburri) and the inspector general (Andrew Carroll), all of the actors play three roles. Outfitted in clever, realistic yet subtly exaggerated costumes by Janus Stephanowicz, part of the joy of the evening is to see the actors alter their voices, posture, and expressions as they assume each new guise. With near cartoonish periwigs, moustaches, goatees, and hats, the thin line between illusion and transparency in dress underscores the self-deceiving psychology of the deceivers. (Hello, 2016 elections.)
Chicanery in a looking glass
The mayor and the pseudo-inspector are meant to mirror each other. The mayor is a complete politician and Tamburri, tall and polished, never wavers in his control of each scene (though Gogol hands him some asides that are too obvious for modern tastes). Khlestakov, in a spiffy but worn tweet suit and striped tie, is part fool and a complete opportunist, glib and as shallow an ungrateful trust-fund kid. Carroll, in a voice that rounds out all the longish speeches he has to make, seizes Khlestakov’s lack of self-awareness and we flow with his ease at being unscrupulous to the point of realizing how much we despise him. After all, in this town everyone’s a scoundrel — and for sale.
Brock blocks all of the actors into staggered lines that allow them to display their different profiles, body shapes, and eccentric costumes. I lost track of the dialogue in one scene as I watched the six hands of three actors array themselves in quick, finger curled movements as if they were all playing an invisible game of cat’s cradle. In another scene, the characters shuffle around each other in an odd, place-changing walk-dance.
Eye-rolling doubt
Of course, we all know the whole thing is a farce, so the eye-rolling doubt of the mayor’s daughter, Maria (Francesca Piccioni), is predictable but appealing — and nowhere to be found when Piccioni appears as the green-velvet-gowned, owl-glassed, clueless school inspector. Tom Dura and Bob Schmidt, as the dim witted landowners Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky, knowingly play perfect rubes, although Gogol made the roles to be rubes with imperfections. When they independently transform into a constable and the postmaster, it makes perfect sense.
Jennifer MacMillan puffs out her cheeks and speaks from her throat as the goateed warden of charities, but then becomes the mayor’s flighty housewife and, later, a wronged locksmith’s widow. Similarly, Christina May is alternately forceful and meek as the district physician and chief of police before becoming an irate shopkeeper who demands that the corruption cease. Naturally, she will never get to tell it to the incompetent puppet-carting judge, Paul McElwee, who also plays the dutiful and sometimes sly Osip.
All of which plays in and around designer Lisi Stoessel’s set, which has ten flat painted panels that allow the actors to force the doors open and slip them quickly, never interrupting the action. The quirky, intermitted music might remind you of the soundtrack to a silent comedy.
My only real complaint is that in Gogol’s time, as in ours, the official, conniving bastards never get what’s coming to them.
February 5, 2016
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Government Inspector
by Toby Zinman
Nicolai Gogol wrote The Government Inspector long ago (nearly two centuries) and far away (Tzarist Russia). He had decided, he wrote, "to hold everything up to ridicule at once." Well, social satire doesn't travel well—especially not over time as well as space-- so it is puzzling that Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium decided to present this labored farce now and here, especially when there is so much in contemporary society and government that begs to be satirized.
The basic plot is that a small provincial town is thrown into a tizzy by a rumor that a government inspector is coming, indeed may have already have arrived in "mufti." They worry that their filthy streets, neglected hospital patients, corrupt officials and sneaky merchants will be discovered and that they will be disgraced and punished by the government.
A young, dashing man (the outstanding Andrew Carroll who actually speaks at a normal tempo) has been staying at the inn: who is this stranger who wears citified clothes and won't pay his hotel bill? Why, surely, they figure, it must be the Government Inspector. Everyone in the town is eager to curry favor, so they throw money, daughters and food at him, hoping to gain some benefit. The show's one genuinely funny moment comes about an hour and a half into the show when the so-called Government Inspector is seducing the mayor's wife (the gifted comedienne Jennifer MacMillan).
Under Tina Brock's direction, the large cast speaks very slowly and very loudly, with much mugging and frequent popping in and out of the multiple doors. There is no set, but merely a back wall whimsically painted with devils and angels; this was designed by Lisi Stoessel which, according to the program notes, is based on Wes Anderson's film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. IRC's production also uses Alexandre Desplat's soundtrack from the same film.
==========================
Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at the Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 9th & Walnut Sts. Through Feb.28. Tickets $15-25. Information: 215-285-0472 or www.IdiopathicRidiculopathyConsortium.org
February 8, 2016
Phindie
THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR (IRC): Corruption!
by Julius Ferraro
Nikolai Gogol’s 1835 satire THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR is written in five acts, but the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s production, directed by Tina Brock, plays as if it was one continuous scene, charging onward like a raging droshky.
A two-story wall painted with the massive faces of colorful, old-fashioned playing cards acts as a mechanical backdrop, with a collection of hinged doors, windows, and portholes cut into it. Designed by Lisi Stoessel, this allows multiple levels of action and plenty of silly business, as characters lean out of windows, poke their head through holes, or enter in rapid succession.
Power-hungry provincial mayor (Jack Tamburri*) receives a letter announcing the impending arrival of an incognito government inspector. He rounds up his slavish junior officials to berate them for their corrupt practices in an attempt to hide his own terror at being caught out. Tamburri delivers an athletic display of two-facedness, leaping from rage to terror back to righteous indignation and incredulity.
Khlestakov (Andrew Carroll), the man they take to be an inspector, is a good-for-nothing gambler, a charming young man with varying luck. When the mayor comes to see him, he first thinks he is going to be arrested for not paying his hotel bill, but quickly adapts to his unusual position of power. In a central scene, each of the junior officials takes a turn approaching Khlestakov to bribe him. Ignorant to their mistake, he perceives their fawning attention as deference to his intimidating stature. He leans in close to a terrified school superintendent, putting his foot up on the man’s chair. “Yes, I suppose there is something in my eyes that makes people go a bit weak at the knees.” Without a change of expression or tone, he changes course: “You couldn’t lend me three hundred roubles, I suppose?”
Khlestakov could be (and has been, over 180 years of productions) seen in a million different ways: he could be cynical, deliberate, diabolical; he could be fumbling and idiotic; he could be boyish and lovable. Carroll’s take is not so much innocent as willfully ignorant, snapping at any advantage. Like an dog eating itself to death, he lives only in the moment, with no conception of history or future. Carroll plays Khlestakov like Khlestakov (and all of the other characters here) would like to be played: as if he is the gallant hero of the story.
Carroll is backed by a great cast of actors for the farce—Jennifer MacMillan as the mayor’s hysterical wife, in particular, sets a grotesque counterpart to her frantic husband, while Francesca Piccioni balances MacMillan out as the gloomy daughter.
The constant smokescreen of accusations and excuses obfuscates reality in this town, and a production could sink quickly in the mire of teasing out what’s real and what isn’t—or who’s corrupt and who’s not. Brock chooses instead to let each line exist in the present, with its character believing that what they say is the closes possible thing to truth. If they are lying, they themselves barely have the faculties to realize it. The result is a production that forefronts Gogol’s surprising, desperate, hypnotizing dialogue.
[Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut Street, 5th floor] February 2-28, 2016; idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org.
February 8, 2016
Phindie
Inspecting the Circus Sideshow of Government: IRC director Tina Brock talks Gogol
by Henrik Eger
The characters in Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector lack love and sympathy for others. It’s this absence of empathy among members of the ruling class and their irresponsibility, corruption, and unwillingness to take positive action which led to protests by Russian conservatives in the reactionary press when it was first produced.
Gogol had become famous through his short stories. He abandoned his first few plays, fearing censorship of the ruling class. In 1835, he asked his friend Pushkin to send him an idea of something very Russian that Gogol wanted to turn into a satirical play. “My hand is itching to write a comedy. . . . Give me a subject and I’ll knock off a comedy in five acts — I promise, funnier than hell. For God’s sake, do it. My mind and stomach are both famished.”
In this two-part interview, Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (IRC) director Tina Brock shares facts and her insights on Gogol’s unique showcase of despicable government officials.
Henrik Eger: Tell us a bit about the philosophy of the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium [IRC], Philadelphia’s popular theater of the surreal, and how it relates to The Government Inspector by Gogol.
Tina Brock: The IRC mission statement reads, “producing and presenting plays that explore and illuminate the human purpose . . .”—with an emphasis on examining our spiritual connection to the world, and those we have relationships with, and how our philosophies, beliefs, and ideals influence the decisions we make. Particularly in Inspector, the ways in which we jump to conclusions about people, make assumptions without the benefit of enough information, and how those judgements may have disastrous consequences, spreading like a wildfire into the community.
Eger: As the IRC director, what intrigued you about Gogol’s The Government Inspector?
Brock: These questions prompted me to tackle this play: Why do we fail to ask enough questions of people in lieu of or in addition to accepting the stories they tell of themselves? It seems it takes much longer to come to know a person’s character given social media. Inspector was written nearly 200 years ago, when the delivery of a letter bearing crucial news took days to arrive. Perhaps people were so excited to receive news, the idea of questioning the messenger was secondary to the event of receiving. Today, information is exchanged so rapidly, it seems the task of stopping to think about the message, the messenger, and the context has been lost by the wayside. With ever more paths of information with many messengers in the mix, taking time to raise pointed questions when necessary is a necessity in order to try and make sense of it all.
The investment of time in getting to know people long enough to see their behaviors over the course of time, to experience and watch the decisions that shape their character, and to allow the chance to evaluate content in addition to presentation is a task that takes time. When fear enters into the equation, when people in positions of power become afraid of losing their interests, then anxiety fuels the proceedings and the act of questioning, contemplating, and verifying before passing along the fear baton is lost. Farce ensues and we’re off and running in an absurd situation. We see it every day.
The Inspector plot centers on two town gossips, Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, who spend all of their time traveling from the Inn to the Market where they sell the meat pies and French Brandy Kegs, excited about the latest piece of information they can pass along to the townspeople. They make it an art to be the first to have the information and squabble over who is the first to deliver, who can get the details right when telling the story. They push each other to be first to share the news. It is based on Bobchinsky’s observations that the new young man in town, Khlestakov, is indeed the government inspector, based on some shaky observations. The townspeople buy his gossip, don’t ask a single question, and the wildfire has been ignited.
Eger: Given IRC’s philosophy, how easy or difficult is it to find plays that are truly surreal and yet speak to us in our own time?
It’s easy to find works that speak to the existential dilemma of reconciling man’s desire to be omnipotent, with the fact that we have limited time to find our purpose and to create meaning in what we do. Playwrights Ionesco and Beckett address the existential crisis head on, allowing the audience to rest in the crisis through feeling, requiring you to submerge in the angst and also, hopefully, the humor.
Eger: You have consistently featured international playwrights, this time Gogol, a Russian Ukrainian. What made his work stand out for you?
Brock: His writing is hilarious. He has a beautiful understanding of human behavior and how our fears drive us to extreme circumstances and how chaos results. Gogol asks that we jump on the locomotive, hold on tight, and go along for the ride, realizing the preposterous chain of events that a simple set of assumptions can ignite. The difference in Gogol’s work from the later absurdist authors is that we don’t light on that existential feeling during the course of the play as we do in Beckett or Ionesco; rather, we expose the folly and the ridiculous situations that create the farce.
The existential questions raised in plays by absurdist authors are particularly potent and resonating with audiences, they are timeless. Perhaps because world events are so hard to fathom, atrocities so great, audiences seem keenly interested in looking inside, celebrating and examining those questions: how can I bring more meaning to what I do? How do my choices affect those around me? So there’s the personal aspect, the looking inside and asking how we can contribute in a more meaningful way, and there’s the system outside ourselves and how we affect that process. The political system has become a circus side show. How do our differences in politics and beliefs lead to such disastrous consequences, and how much healing might happen if people were to take the time to have a conversation and listen with the intent of understanding, not judging, and hold each other and our leaders accountable without being branded troublemakers. As Ionesco said, “It’s not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
Eger: We are going into the presidential election this year with a lot of angry people: Republicans who believe that it’s all the fault of “the government,” while Democrats tend to blame the greed and corruption of the corporate world. How do you connect your production of The Government Inspector to these deeply seated fears in the US?
Brock: People are angry because their voices aren’t being heard. They are tired of being marginalized, tired of being told they don’t know what they are talking about, and they don’t have the intelligence or understanding to propose solutions to simple and complex problems. We are all people. We live, work, eat, play, have ideas how to solve life’s dilemmas—and try to solve problems. You don’t have to be a specialist in any discipline to propose a solution or be in charge of change. People need to ask questions and leaders need to provide answers or admit they don’t know the answer. And we need to get over the social stigma that can go along with demanding straight clear answers and accountability. It’s the accountability piece that’s very distressing. Certain people in society, because of rank, privilege, and order, have an automatic hall pass to do whatever they please in the name of advancing their particular agenda.
February 9, 2016
The Broad Street Review
Satire Without a Clear Target
by Mark Cofta
The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, now in its 11th year, can take the most tired and obvious of the classic plays that fall into the nebulous “absurdist” category and infuse them with energy and life, even if they don’t seem to deserve it. Such is The Government Inspector, Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 comedy spoofing small-town corruption and greed.
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.
February 10, 2016
Foley Got Comped
by Jessica Foley
4 months ago state officials in Flint, Michigan confessed that the water flowing through the taps have been so contaminated by lead that it qualified as toxic waste since April of 2014.
The morning of February 10th, I picked up the Washington Post and read: “As a probe begins into the water crisis gripping Flint, Mich., Todd Flood, special counsel for the state attorney general’s office who is in charge of the investigation declared: “We’re here to investigate what possible crimes there are, anything [from] involuntary manslaughter or death … to misconduct in office. We take this very seriously.”
Hours later, 7:30pm, sitting in the Walnut’s Studio 5, at the start of the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s production of Nikolai Gogol’s of The Government Inspector, I thought how timely! Watching Jack Tamburri as the slovenly sweaty provincial mayor, Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky, panicking over the impending arrival of the anonymous Government Inspector from the fashionable St. Petersburg.
Jack Tamburri as Mayor, Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky with Paul McEwlee as one of 3 characters he plays with long Russian names too long for this poor caption. I felt like I was watching the former mayor of Flint, Dayne Walling or Gov, Rick Snyder break a sweat as they are both currently being sued by the residents of Flint.
Gogol may have been critiquing the Tsarist Russia of his day in 1836, saying: “In Government Inspector I decided to gather into one heap everything rotten in Russia as I then saw it.”
Although, to me, Gogol’s Government Inspector is talking about everything rotten in America today; corruption on Wall Street where Congressmen like Alan Grayson, (Democrat of Florida) lead double lives as hedge fund managers, the aforementioned water crisis today in Flint, Michigan or F.S. Edmonds Elementary, right here in Philadelphia. Last month a boiler exploded and a School District maintenance employee was injured. In response, School District spokesperson Fernando Gallard told NewsWorks: “We believe our buildings are safe… Still little has been done to fix the boiler.
Pick an issue, pick a headline from today's paper; Gogol’s got it covered in his Government Inspector.
Set designer, Lisi Stoessel has built an eggshell-colored fortress made of the phantasmagoric stuff of daydreams: delicately painted Rose-colored hearts, ponies, clowns, and fluffy clouds. The ten actors seem to spill out of the ten doors appearing to crack the eggshell fortress when making their entrances confessing their sins directly to the audience. Government appointed judges like Ammos Fiodorovich Liapkin-Tiapkin (Paul McElwee), a stuffed greyhound puppy wedged under his arm, stumbles out and blurts out: “I tell everyone plainly that I take bribes. I make no bones about it. But what kind of bribes? White greyhound puppies?”
The streets are dirty, the prisoners locked up in the prisons were not given their rations, the sick patients laid up in the hospitals have been denied their porridge.
But the greatest sin committed in this production is that aside from the always captivating, always committed, the fire-eating actor, Tomas Dura, and the sturdy, Paul McElwee, the majority of cast fails to perform with the crisp discipline director, Tina Brock needed to rein in Gogol’s thick text.
The luminous talent of Andrew Carroll serves as a light switch, flipping this show on all the way up to bright when he enters as the Ivan Alexandrovich Khlestakov, a young starving gambler mistaken for a Government official fresh from St. Petersburg. When Carroll enters you pay attention because his razor sharp talent commands it, and when he exits, the show lags back to a dim Waiting for Guffman-style community theater production, or in this case, this show is all about Waiting for Carroll to come back on the damn stage.