26-03-2025
Theater review: Yale Rep's ‘The Inspector' is a feast for the eyes and the funny bone
Yale Repertory Theatre's production of 'The Inspector' — aka Nikolai Gogol's 'Revizor' — could be so meaningful to so many different people that you could get smothered in its many layers if director Yura Kordonsky and the dozen actors didn't unfold it all so carefully and clear.
Let us inspect the ways.
First, it's a design feast. Snow and soot are constant throughout the 2 1/2 hours the audience spends in the Russian village where the play is set. The elements extend so it seems slushy and grubby at the base of the stage as well. Scenic designer Silin Chen uses the scuffed, stained backstage brick walls of the theater to frame the wintry image. The effect is of a show sliding into reality and back into dystopian fantasy.
That is kind of what Gogol's play does as well. It's routinely called a satire, but the play's brilliant ending wants to make clear that the story's seemingly farcical levels of corruption and power abuse aren't really fiction and just need someone to report on it and stand up against it. The character who does that in 'The Inspector' is Ivan Khlestakov, and he's no hero. He's a kind of a high-maintenance drifter, accompanied by a servant named Osip, a gambler and trickster who's trying to replenish his fortunes when he gets the fortune of all: He gets mistaken for somebody else. The mayor and his cronies in the village have heard that an inspector is on the way to examine their accounts and procedures. They think Khlestakov is that inspector. He gets to see their corruption and duplicity firsthand, mostly because when they offer him special favors and bribes, he's happy to take them.
Yale Rep tackles timeless Russian political comedy 'The Inspector' with youthful cast and new ideas
Nobody is pure in 'The Inspector,' not even the driven snow. The comedy has a consistency: Everyone is guilty, everyone is needy and everyone is a little foolish and desperate. Every character has their own barely logical justification for why they need to steal from others, or lie to others, or lie to themselves.
Director Yura Kordonsky, born in Russia and trained as a director by those who had been trained by Konstantin Stanislavski, has also been teaching theater in Connecticut for the past quarter century, first at Wesleyan University and for the past decade at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. He brings both an innate understanding of Russian theater and a sense of what works best at a university-based professional regional theater like the Yale Rep.
The Geffen School shares that breadth of knowledge and technique. Nearly 30 years ago, the drama school sent students to Russia to collaborate on a production of 'Revizor' with students and teachers at the St. Petersburg Academy of Dramatic Arts. The collaboration, which had a few public performances at the Yale Rep in 1997, was eye-opening and mind-expanding in how American and Russian styles came together, but it did not have the expansive design and stylistic consistency that defines this new version.
Kordonsky has cast actors whom he knew when they were his students at Yale. Since they had all been through the same classes, it's a sort of shorthand for making them a tight ensemble despite limited rehearsal time. The director sets some difficult fast/slow rhythms, and scenes shift from loud to soft-spoken. The cast members are able to maneuver them while still each bringing some individual spark to the production.
As the mayor, Brandon E. Burton is amusingly unprepared for all the snap decisions he must make, but he smartly comes off as agitated rather than dimwitted. Elizabeth Stahlmann plays the mayor's wife Anna as flirtatious and vain but not a pitiable manner. She's strong and direct. As Marya, the daughter of Ann and the mayor, Chinna Palmer has to be a romantic ingenue in a story where true romance is impossible. She finds a path where she is both romantic and funny, and also avoids being the underdeveloped, underplayed love-object which Marya too often is in other productions.
Samuel Douglas plays Khlestakov as cocksure and greedy, too clever for his own good, adding to the suspense of whether he gets away with his deceit or gets his comeuppance.
Osip is presented in both Kordonsky's adaptation and in Nomè SiDone's upstanding, unflappable performance as an example of how noble and immensely capable people get crushed by racist or status-based societies.
Almost nobody plays stupid or cartoonishly out of it. These are social stereotypes, but it's also within the realm of possibility that the doctor (Grayson Richmond) has medical knowledge or that the school superintendent (John Evans Reese) has visited a school.
'The Inspector' avoids a lot of easy dumb jokes that would weaken the production and undercut its sharp satire. It does, however, welcome a lot of wacky comedy gags when they are appropriate. There's a physical comedy bit with an untied boot that goes on so long you marvel at it as if it were a circus act. As the message-bearing townsfolk Piotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky and Piotr Ivanovic Dobchinsky, Edoardo Benzoni and Malik James are an inspired comedy duo, interrupting each other and taking their speech habits to ridiculous extremes. They do so not in a classic Abbott and Costello style that would get tiresome quickly but in ways they sneak up on you.
Kordonsky's adaptation is leisurely in its staging but has been cut and shaped very precisely. The director has made two great innovations. The youthful cast helps streamline the satire so that government corruption is simply a fact of life and not something that only older, settled people fall into it. The play is also cut so that, while the lower class denizens of this downtrodden village are mentioned constantly, they're not really seen, heightening the interactions among the town's swindling leaders and their swindling faux-inspector guest.
Gogol's play seldom goes out of fashion. If there's a governmental system near you that you don't like, you'll be bolstered by this knowing, winking comedy. But the Yale Rep isn't content with just uttering anti-authoritarian tropes from 1846. 'The Inspector' has a wondrous, slippery, sooty scene design. It has a cast of fresh comic/dramatic talents encouraged to try new things. It has the lived-in appeal of a show that takes its time and gets you comfortable in its crazed environment. And unlike its corrupt characters, the production stands up powerfully under close inspection, especially in how it draws out all types of laughter.
'The Inspector,' adapted and directed by Yura Kordonsky, runs through March 29 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven. Remaining performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., with a matinee at 2 p.m. on March 29. $15-$65.
