Playwright: David Farr, with additional material by James Sherman, adapted from the play by Nikolai Gogol
At: Next Theatre Company at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes, Evanston
Phone: 847-475-1875; $23-$38
Runs through: Oct. 12
You see, there's this provincial village whose mayor and city council have been warned that an emissary from the king has been sent to check up on them, but that the fatal agent will be traveling incognito. Soon thereafter, this itinerant beggar wanders into town, where he is promptly assumed to be the royal snitch.
And therein lies one of the most reliable plots in the history of western comedy. It was funny when Nikolai Gogol employed it in 1836 because the bigwigs were hicks and the impostor a rascal, all of them decidedly inferior in status to the play's patrons. It was funny in the 1949 film because Danny Kaye's vagabond was an innocent shlep, inspiring sympathy rather than contempt. And it's funny in 2005 because the corrupt government officials who so dread an audit on their books are the leaders of a country recently liberated from Soviet rule and eager to embrace the ways of capitalism. This makes it easy for them to mistake the ugliest of Ugly Americans for a representative of the International Monetary Fund, even as he takes their bribe money and seduces their women.
To be sure, the savagery of the satire in this adaptation by British playwright David Farr could make sensitive theatergoers uneasy—the slapstick business with the severed tongue of a dissident journalist, for example, or the willingness of the country's president to sacrifice his daughter's life rather than have his folly exposed. Chicago's own James Sherman has tweaked the material for American audiences, however, relying on familiar place-names to draw nostalgic chuckles even when invoked by the most repugnant of ambassadors.
Director Jason Loewith likewise loads on the cartoon-choreography to keep the action firmly planted in the realm of Marx Brothers-styled farce ( e.g., the president's portrait slipping from the wall—twice—to reveal the faces of first Putin, then Stalin ) . Joe Dempsey's hoggish homeboy and Bill McGough's obsequious commander-in-chief lead an ensemble of thoroughly reprehensible scoundrels, though the tag-team award goes to the bevy of bureaucrats portrayed by Will Schutz, Joseph Wycoff, Douglas Vickers, Mark Mysliwiec and Elizabeth Laidlaw ( the last equipped with eye patch and cyanide vial ) . Their precisely timed buffoonery deftly reduces the potential offensiveness of their material to send us home comfortably secure in our superiority to the hypocritical scalawags we have just seen.
