Dear Friend, STC Board of Trustees Table of Contents Thank you for joining us for Putting Russia on Stage Nikolai Gogol’s The Government by Drew Lichtenberg 6 Inspector, which we first read in our ReDiscovery Series in 2011. Board of Trustees W. Mike House Emeritus Trustees Title Page 9 If you joined us for that reading, Michael R. Klein, Chair Jerry J. Jasinowski R. Robert Linowes*, I need not tell you how laugh- Robert E. Falb, Vice Chair Norman D. Jemal Founding Chairman About the Playwright 11 John Hill, Treasurer Jeffrey M. Kaplan James B. Adler out-loud funny it was. But The Pauline Schneider, Secretary Scott Kaufmann Heidi L. Berry* Cast 13 Government Inspector has more than just jokes: the Michael Kahn, Artistic Director Abbe D. Lowell David A. Brody* play’s satirical depiction of small-town corruption has Eleanor Merrill Melvin S. Cohen* Cast Biographies 14 Trustees Melissa A. Moss Ralph P. Davidson made it one of Russia’s most beloved classics. It’s a Nicholas W. Allard Robert S. Osborne James F. Fitzpatrick Direction and perfect choice for our first Russian play, as audiences Ashley Allen Stephen M. Ryan Dr. Sidney Harman* Design Biographies 17 in Washington, D.C., can appreciate what it has to say. Stephen E. Allis George P. Stamas Lady Manning I would like to thank the Likhachev Foundation for Anita M. Antenucci Bill Walton Kathleen Matthews About STC 20 Jeffrey D. Bauman Lady Westmacott William F. McSweeny inviting me to St. Petersburg last year and welcoming Afsaneh Beschloss Rob Wilder V. Sue Molina Support 22 me into Gogol’s world. Landon Butler Suzanne S. Youngkin Walter Pincus Dr. Paul Carter Eden Rafshoon For STC 30 Chelsea Clinton Ex-Officio Emily Malino Scheuer* Our cast includes many gifted actors from the Dr. Mark Epstein Chris Jennings, Lady Sheinwald STC Staff 34 Washington community, nearly all of whom Andrew C. Florance Managing Director Mrs. Louis Sullivan have previously performed at the Shakespeare Miles Gilburne Daniel W. Toohey Audience Services 35 Theatre Company. Many of them were also in our Barbara Harman Sarah Valente John R. Hauge Lady Wright ReDiscovery reading of the play, and I’m thrilled to be Stephen A. Hopkins working with so many familiar faces and old friends. Lawrence A. Hough * Deceased As our 2012-2013 Season continues, we will welcome several international productions through our STC Presents Series. The National Theatre of Scotland’s moving production of Black Watch plays at Sidney Harman Hall September 19 through October 7, and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart will be performed in a D.C. pub. Our new season of NT Live features screenings of the National Theatre’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Last of the Haussmans. In December, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, from Paris’ Théâtre de l’Atelier and modernized by director John Malkovich, will play Directed by Ethan McSweeny a limited engagement. Sidney Harman Hall This fall, Ethan McSweeny will return to STC to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I hope you will join us during the holiday season for what promises to be a November 15– magical production. December 30, 2012 Warm regards, On sale now. Michael Kahn reams Artistic Director imagined.D Shakespeare Theatre Company Production Sponsors Restaurant Partner Arlene and Robert Kogod 2 3 The Gov’t Inspector Program Ad A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.875” x 3.875” No Bleed, K August 29, 2012 C. Low TM TM & © 2012 Paramount Pictures and TM & © 2012 The Estate of Irving Berlin. All Rights Reserved. FROM THE CREATORS OF SOUTH PARK THE KENNEDY CENTER 2012–2013 THEATER SEASON Plus Barbara Cook’s Spotlight, international performances from Ireland, South Africa, and the Nordic countries, and more! For tickets and information, visit kennedy-center.org or call (202) 467-4600. The Kennedy Center Theater Season Musical Theater at the Kennedy Center is made possible through is sponsored by Altria Group. the generosity of the Adrienne Arsht Musical Theater Fund. Additional support for War Horse is provided by Laura Pels. Barbara Cook’s Spotlight is made possible through the generosity of the Charles E. Smith Family Foundation. International Programming at the Kennedy Center is made possible through the generosity of the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts. 4 But the characters in The Government Inspector also resemble modern souls stuck in a medieval society. For example, take Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, the foolish townspeople who set the plot in motion with Putting Russia on Stage: their noses for gossip. At first glance, they appear to be obvious comic types. But at second glance, it becomes apparent that they are Gogol’s portrait of the Russian everyman. Pyotr Ivanovich Dobchinsky Gogol’s National Comedy and Pyotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky are the only two characters in the play who come from the minor landed gentry, Russia’s mammoth and anonymous middle class. Their class, which renders them effectively hen Nikolai Gogol wrote The Government Inspector in 1836, there was no such thing as a doppelgangers, explains their ceaseless competition with Shpekin, the town’s Postmaster. Information is Russian drama. Tsar Nicholas I adored going to the theatre and consequently all St. Petersburg power, power is identity, and an identity is something that both men manifestly do not have. W theatres were regulated by Nicholas’ petty officials, “government inspectors” who dictated costume designs, roles for actors and even the official repertory. As a result, from the turn of the century Halfway through the play, Gogol pauses the action so Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky can interview Hlestakov. until well into the 1850s, the Russian theatre was dominated by European imports: ballets and operas, Each makes an absurd request, yet they are ones that register the characters’ lack of identity with a painful alongside the neoclassical plays of Molière and the romantic plays of Schiller and Goethe. More than 100 clarity of emotion. Dobchinsky asks Hlestakov to allow his bastard son to bear his name. Bobchinsky, years after Peter the Great had ordered his courtiers to shave their facial hair, Russian drama had yet to meanwhile, wants Hlestakov, when he returns to St. Petersburg, to simply speak his name. “It doesn’t have grow the beard. to be the whole name,” Bobchinsky pleads. “It doesn’t even have to be in your home, it could be in an alley late at night when no one’s around.” While the twinned identities of Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky are a If a Russian play dared to end unhappily, or to suggest that all running joke in the play, it is also Gogol’s symbol of the profound lack of identity felt by the Russian landed was not well in St. Petersburg, it was kept offstage by Nicholas’ class. Dobchinsky’s son doesn’t have his name, and thus doesn’t exist in a legal sense, whereas Bobchinsky “What is comedy zealous censors. The most prominent plays from the period isn’t even sure that he exists at all. Both are examples of what Gogol would term, in his great novel from by Russian authors, such as Alexander Griboyedov’s Wit Works 1842, “dead souls”: the anonymous lives, seemingly infinite, being lived by the Russian people, far away without truth Woe (1822), Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Gudonov (1825) and from the watchful eye of the capital. Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade (1835), were all banned. and fury?” None of them would appear on a Russian stage until the 1860s. This great theme, perhaps, is the reason that The Government Inspector, one of the funniest plays in the Letter from N. Gogol In fact, Pushkin’s Boris Gudonov would not appear in a fully classical repertory, has also courted political controversy. This was the play that was being performed when to M. P. Pogodin, unexpurgated text until 2007, when it was produced in English Stalin shut down theatres in the late 1930s. It has also been revived in Putin’s Russia, resonating with February 20, 1833 translation at Princeton University. Perhaps most damningly, in audiences as if it was written yesterday. (And for those of you who pay attention to the news, you know that 1835, the year before The Government Inspector’s premiere, not political performance in Russia remains a dangerous line of work.) We’ll never know what Gogol would make a single new Russian comedy was performed in the capital. of the play’s legacy, but he can rest easy knowing that he fulfilled his own command: by staging such vivid images of Russian life, he gave Russians themselves. The drama would never be the same. Into this situation stepped Nikolai Gogol, a well-regarded author of short stories, a provincial outsider and a profound eccentric. Gogol had already revolutionized Russian prose and he set out now to create a Drew Lichtenberg, Literary Associate national Russian drama. Rather than imitate French or German writers, Gogol wanted to put Russian life onstage. All of it. In Gogol’s “St. Petersburg Notes of 1836,” a scathing review of 1830s theatre practices, he sounds the alarm: For heaven’s sake, give us Russian characters, give us ourselves! … We have become so accustomed to tame French plays that we are timid about seeing ourselves. The Government Inspector would do precisely that. Gogol got the idea for the play when he wrote to his friend Pushkin. He had quit his job—he had been lecturing on medieval history at St. Petersburg University— and he needed money. “Send me some subject,” he wrote to Pushkin: an authentically Russian anecdote. My hand is itching to write a comedy... Give me a subject and I’ll knock off a comedy in five acts—I promise, funnier than hell.