Word: inspector
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...CHARACTERS in this Inspector General huddle together onstage, shoulders hunched and arms poised as if to ward off some painful blow that could fall anytime, anywhere. Director Peter Sellars deploys Gogol's gallery of human grotesques under black bumbershoots--protection not from rain but from the details of daily life that intrude on their passivity. They seem to be fighting a desperately comical rearguard action against nasty, brutish human nature, and losing...
Gogol had no particular town, government or country in mind when he concocted his play; his target was the pathetic mendacity of everyone, everywhere. The rural officials who mistake a visiting landowner's son for an inspector general from Petersburg show off every human failing, but in shriveled, impoverished versions. They cower from their own defects like they cower from the rest of the world. Their sins, they protest, are "sinlets...
...entirely non-verbal, vacuous moan and a galloping torrent of words tripping over each other in their eagerness to overwhelm the listener. He shouts "I'm not guilty" like an incantation to dispel the ills the world flings at him; his colleagues ponder their response to the supposed inspector-general's arrival with the cacophonous murmur of an elderly Orthodox Jewish congregation praying at different speeds. Richard Grusin's nasal, rotund Director of Welfare Institutions and Eric Elice's contortionist Superintendent of Schools, especially, transform this group into a human array of deformity who physically mirror their own insides...
SELLARS, WHOSE past work at Harvard has shown great imagination in conception and staging but often left actors stranded without a secure place in the theater, seems to have thrived working with the ART's professionals. Their self-assured individuality complements the impersonal quality this Inspector General shares with much of Sellars' work to give it unity and plenitude of intelligible detail...
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...