When Russian playwright Nikolai Gogol's comedy of cheerful chicanery and government corruption,
The Inspector General, opened in 1836, he was 27 years old. That's not that much older than NKU junior, Jonathan Pernisek, who has created a brash and dashing re-investigation of the core topics of Gogol's ageless satire.
Not all of Pernisek's staging of this play works, but some does. Nor does all of the premiere production succeed, but some does -- especially a series of two- and three-character comic confrontations that make up the first half of the second act.
Pernisek, with guidance from director and faculty advisor Michael E. King, retained little more than the plot outline and broad character essentials from Gogol's script as he invested the action with contemporary comic sensibility and transplanted it to the American frontier.
Like Gogol's original, Pernisek's script is less a plot-driven play than a series of farcical improvisations strung together on a common theme. Bribery, graft and civic corruption run rife in a small, Wild West town. Panic sets in with the rumor that an incognito government inspector is investigating local officials.
When the mayor, sheriff, judge, police, hospital administrator and others learn that a mysterious guest is staying in the local hotel, they leap to a logical, though incorrect assumption. The stranger, actually a clerk with a gambling problem, is only too willing to exploit their error -- accepting their bribes and putting the moves on their wives and daughters.
King keeps his cast of 28 hopping. The pace is headlong, sometimes energetic, more often just frenzied. While much of the physical comedy is well staged and well executed, most of the 28 performers exhibit less than needful vocal precision.
Leading the proceedings is a swift, sure-footed performance by sophomore theater major Cary Davenport as the clerk. This young man shows the makings of an estimable farceur, both in the clear way he turns his phrases and the economical way he shapes his gestures. Katie Kershaw and Justin Adams also show well. Grade: B-
THE INSPECTOR GENERAL continues at Northern Kentucky University through Sunday.
