Joan Marcus photo
Samuel Douglas and Nomè SiDone in The Inspector.
The Inspector
Yale Repertory Theatre
1120 Chapel St.
Through March 29
When you walk into the Yale Repertory Theatre for its production of The Inspector, the first thing you’ll probably notice is the giant streetlamp. Perched just behind orchestra left, the lamp holds up a vast clothesline above the audience’s heads, connecting to an identical streetlamp deep within the whitewashed facade of the stage. The floor itself is covered in a couple inches of poly-fill snow that you just know is destined to get everywhere.
As the play goes on, it becomes quickly apparent that Silin Chen’s scenic design was meant to do just that. Actors are coated with the stuff, either by happenstance or from a spontaneous snowball fight, and as they run rampant through the aisles, they leave the fluffy white tracks in their wake. When a trenchcoat is hung from the clothesline, it precariously hangs a story or two above the audience’s heads. And the streetlamps double as loudspeakers, which transduce a static‑y, ominous warning that feels as though it’s right next to your ear.
The setup serves as evidence that Yura Kordonsky’s adaptation and direction of The Inspector aims to break down the barrier between the audience and the play itself. This is especially fitting for a work most famous for its bombastic fourth-wall break in the finale, a literary device that has found its way in our modern era from Fleabag to Deadpool.
The story itself is not super complicated. A score of ineffective government officials of a rural Russian village receive news that judgement day is coming, its harbinger a hotshot government inspector from the the urban metropolis of Saint Petersburg. The dramatic irony is that the man they take for the inspector, Ivan Khlestakov (played by a delightfully manic Samuel Douglas), is in fact a bureaucratic nobody.
Nikolai Gogol’s play takes this premise to its farcical extreme, and the production meets Gogol right where he’s at. An associate professor at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama, Kordonsky kept casting in the family. All of the actors are either current students or alums of the school, and lucky for paying audiences, the family is pretty damn good.
John Evans Reese and Samuel Douglas.
Whether it’s expert physical comedy and dynamic fight choreography (thanks to Kelsey Rainwater and Michael Rossmy), the cast brings consistent laughs to a play whose modus operandi is laughter. Of particular highlight are Grayson Richmond as the doctor (who doesn’t speak a lick of English, yet goes through an entire dramatic arc of his own), John Evans Reese as the school superintendent, and Edoardo Benzoni and Malik James as Piotr Bobchinksy and Dobchinsky, respectively. When the play shifts over to dreams, Arseniy Gusev’s eerie score of scratchy strings provides a nice contrast to KT Farmer’s playful and striking costume design.
By the iconic finale of the play, Kordonsky has already pulverized the fourth wall — whether it’s sly turns to the audience as if they’re in a Russian adaptation of The Office, or direct questions about the eye color of the eponymous inspector. But when the famous denouement finally comes, it falls flat.
Kordonsky’s vision of this scene makes it a pivot into something more grounded. Yet there was a miscommunication: The audience couldn’t stop chuckling, even as the Mayor (a very funny Brandon E. Barton) repeated his line, perhaps in hope of shutting them up. It is not Barton’s gravitas that falls flat, but the downside of Kordonsky’s gambit as director — if the fourth wall has continually been broken as a joke, by the time the play wants to mean it, the audience doesn’t know any better but to keep laughing.
The laughter, uproarious on opening night, still signals that the Rep has a hit on its hands. As with any comedy, not every joke will land, and audiences may come away feeling as though 15 minutes could’ve been trimmed from the gargantuan two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Still, it is the Rep’s most widely appealing production of the season so far— with a go-for-broke cast, and an unfortunately timely message about government corruption. Take it from me: You do not want to miss out on this engaging and hysterical re-imagination of a timeless classic.
And a pro tip: If you like audience participation (or just want to take some of the “snow” home), make sure you sit by an aisle.
Malik James and Edoardo Benzoni.
Grayson Richmond, Whitney Andrews, and Brandon E. Burton.