Thursday, November 6, 1997
Innovative twist given to classic Russian play
THEATER: Director has a new interpretation of Gogol’s ‘The
Inspector’
By Michael Gillette
Daily Bruin Contributor
Like Shakespeare, Nikolai Gogol is a writer whose plays demand a
careful and uniform approach. His works are like pieces of music,
and if a player is out of key, or – worse yet – out of tune, the
enjoyment of the whole is lost.
For a moment, this threatened to be the case at the Tabula Rasa
company’s production of Gogol’s best known play, "The Inspector."
The play, at Culver City’s Gascon Center Theater through Nov. 23,
is about a ne’er-do-well clerk, who is mistaken for a traveling
inspector by a pack of corrupt bureaucrats in a small town where he
has run out of cash. It opens with a scene where the frightened
city officials learn the news from this town’s governor.
Rather than play the governor as the highest ranking fool in the
room, a man with authority but little wit or wherewithal, director
Phillip Cates has actor Hiram Casten as a cocky, blustering middle
management type, one who fancies himself as cut out for better
things, but who in fact seems ideally suited for his mediocre
station.
Casten swaggers his way through the scene, tugging at his lapels
and bellowing at his underlings. The laughter one would garner from
presenting a room full of petrified dolts vanish as a result,
leaving the players mugging for laughs. But the stage is set for
Cates’s second daring choice: the casting of the rogue clerk Ivan
Khlestakov with another cocky, blustering middle management type,
played by actor Chad Restum.
On the page, the part would seem to call for a sleazy, scrawny
Dostoevskivian type who has spent years slaving away at a copying
desk while cultivating his delusions of grandeur. Restum, however,
plays the character as a confident, if resentful, charlatan who,
while having failed at his first attempt at the high life, can
quite easily spot the townspeople mistake and take the fruits of it
as his just desserts.
The pairing of these two works beautifully. The one smugly
secure in the illusion that he’s solving his problem as he hands
over bribe after bribe, the other just as smug in the spirit of
entitlement with which he accepts them. The high point undoubtedly
comes at the end of the first act, where a drunken Ivan starts
spinning fantastic tales about his life in the capital: He’s a
dignitary! He’s a poet! Generals cower before him! The Czar enlists
his help! Etc.! Restum is fabulous as he stalks the stage, and
Kasten is just as fabulous, communicating that the governor has
been taken in, but watches, not in awe, but in expectation that
he’ll be sharing the good life with his new friend.
The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent. Special mention,
however, should be made of Andy Prosky, who plays Dobrovsky, and of
Joe Ochman in the small part of the waiter. Each manages to summon
up the bizarre, grotesque and almost other-worldly quality
unmistakable in Gogol’s prose, and all too rarely found in daily
life. Prosky is simply mesmerizing. His performance is a collection
of tics – bobbing, lisping, double-taking – that correspond
perfectly to the dim dilletanteis character. Ochman opts for the
opposite approach, playing the waiter with a willful lethargy. He
seems to approach the part as pure theater – the slow laugh, the
sleepy drawl – and any attempt to psychologize his motives would be
as ridiculous as the people painted in Gogol’s town.
Almost as fun as the scenario in this production is the
costuming, which seemed to offer a caricature of every preconceived
Russian stereotype, including: a Lenin-esque judge (Will Kepper); a
rustic, drunken school superintendent (Neil Larson) who might have
walked out of a Chagall painting; and a large carping babushka
struggling to look half her age (Sharon Madden). Even the lighting
scheme managed to give everything the yellowish tint one finds on
whatever picture a publisher puts on the cover of their edition of
"Crime and Punishment." Clearly, Phillip Cates and company have
served Gogol and the audience quite well with this production.
THEATER: "The Inspector" by Nikolai Gogol plays at the Gascon
Center Theater, 8737 Washington Blvd, Culver City through Nov. 23.
Tickets are $15, $10 for students and seniors. For more
information, call (213) 658-4020