Word: gogol
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Into this festering, still pool of corruption drops the inert stone of Khlestakov, the young visitor, sending violent waves through everyone else's life but remaining happily, passively at rest himself. Mark Linn-Baker seems deliberately to make no more and no less of this character than Gogol did--which is to say, nothing, a personality-less cipher whose every action either fulfills the most hollow expectations of societal conduct or moves inertially towards a well-fed rest. Unable to choose, he mechanically makes love to both the mayor's wife and daughter--two primped peacocks immobile on a divan...
...critic ought not reveal the various surprises in Sellars' staging of Gogol's already apocalyptic ending, but the virtues and problems of the new translation by Sellars and Sam Guckenheimer can be addressed without giving anything away. The literal rendition into English of Gogol's gnarled, misshapen and often deliberately ungrammatical Russian has both rewards and dangers. Most of the Russian adages come across powerfully--as when the distraught mayor cries, "I have outlived my own mind!"--but occasionally lines fail to connect ("Both have fallen finger-first in heaven"). Gogol's sense of the absurd surfaces frequently and effectively...
...Gogol's farcical humor shows itself in this production nowhere better than in Steven Drury's music. In the first half of the play, the town officials perform a "Kitchen Symphony" on pots, frying pans, and water-coolers; after the intermission, they bring up the curtain with a solemn, processional concerto grosso for kazoo. Music seems somehow a more congenial way for these characters to communicate the timid ridiculousness of their lives than words...
MOST OF SELLARS' Inspector General understandingly subordinates the moralizing inherent in Gogol's near religious allegory to its boundless wealth of burlesque, making the play a perfect entertainment above all else. Neither Sellars nor the ART actors are shy of sight-gags; in just one extraordinarily droll mime sequence, Stephen Rowe's embarassed Bobchinsky, stranded in front of the curtain with a broken nose, loses his only companion on the stage--a cubic wooden platform that descends as he leans on it--and shuffles nervously, disconsolately offstage...
...Khlestakov like a second, ghostly audience. In his impenetrable complacency, he can ignore them with a wave of his hand. But if the audience on the other side is to respect itself any more than it respects him, it's forced to contemplate its own visate in this, Gogol's mirror...