The summer bonanza of Russian theater continues with director Valery Fokin’s savagely funny “The Inspector General,” on tour from the famous Alexandrinsky Theater of St. Petersburg. Gogol’s masterpiece kicked off the Summerscape program at Bard College – a festival that, if you can get to it, rivals Lincoln Center’s for scope and excitement.

The venue itself is a thrill. Set well back on the fields of Bard’s campus, Frank Gehry’s new Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts looms, seeming to shift its giant metal panels in the sunlight. From one angle, the building has a sinister elegance – a deep, metal awning extends like a maw over the front doors. But approach it from the side, and it looks like an aluminum bunny. “The Inspector General,” disturbing and goofy, hit the same notes.

Gogol’s 1836 depiction of a corrupt small town, full of provincial buffoons mad to impress a government inspector, heralded the coming of the 20th century’s symbolist revolution. For nearly a century, Russia enjoyed the play’s farce, before Meyerhold’s landmark 1926 production made it the harbinger of expressionism. Mr. Fokin has used Meyerhold’s adaptation – part of the “Tradition’s New Life” season at the Alexandrinsky – though he cut it to a sprightly two and a half hours. He also trims most of Meyerhold’s overt stylizations, leaving a production that feels modern and uncluttered.

When Mayor Skvoznik DMukhanovsky (Sergei Parshin) hears the government has turned its all-seeing eye on his tiny village, a desperate clean-up effort begins. Anticipating the inspector’s arrival, hospital patients get new nightcaps and local officials rush to hide the geese over-running the courthouse. No pretense is spared: They put a fence under construction (by knocking it over), because “The more we destroy, the more it seems the mayor is doing something.” Subway riders take note.

The man they take for an Inspec tor, however, is scalawag and gambler Ivan Khlestakov. His funds have run out, and sure of eviction from his hotel, he is more than ready to exploit the townsfolk’s sudden generosity. As he accepts glass after glass of vodka, he spins the fantasy of glamorous St. Petersburg, at one point literally bringing down the golden facade of his imagined palace to hover over the village’s heads.

Both silly and macabre, Alexei Devotchenko’s Khlestakov and his servant Osip (Yurii Tsurilo) are shinypated monsters. Tiny Khlestakov, coasting on the town’s mistaken impression of him, buzzes like a fly around the giant Osip. He bounces from lie to lie and turns purple with a strange, misplaced rage. As he accepts bribes, lunches, and the May or’s womenfolk, his paroxysms serve to further charm the townsfolk. The gentle-hearted, baffled Mayor even gently palpates Khlestakov’s legs up and down, helping him to ravish his own daughter.

There’s plenty of adorable mayhem to be had, especially when the entire town enters freshly bald, emulating their beloved, hairless Inspector – but Mr. Fokin and Gogol have a deeper game to play. Mr. Fokin lets the “little worm” assume the power of evil – he skitters through the Mayor’s antechamber unseen at the top of the play, and appears, singing, through doorways he could never have reached. But it’s an evil that we know well.

Accompanied by the eerie a cappella choir Remake, who sing down at us from a balcony, Khlestakov’s manipulations begin to feel familiar. How easily we accept authority’s word! How eager we are to hear what we wish! Mirrors in the scenery face outwards, and we can just glimpse our own distorted features hanging there. For that, no translation is necessary.

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Whisking the action from Potemkin village to Brighton Beach, a set of Russians wind up in New York in Dmitri Lipkin’s “The Wanderer,” now at the Flea. Mr. Lipkin also dips his toe into the waters of magical realism, though his efforts seem confused and unfinished. Unfortunately, the possibilities of his odd fable are obscured by a pedantic, unimaginative production by Adam Melnick.

A mysterious man (Seth Kanor) falls from the sky, unsure of his identity. Over the next two hours, he will take on a number of personas, all somehow bearing on the lives of a tight-knit group of Russian immigrants. For each of them, an interaction with him will leave them changed. Boris (the babyfaced Chris Kipiniak), a petty enforcer, encounters him as a baker he has been told to rough up, which he finds increasingly distasteful. Boris’s girlfriend Shura (a limp Amelia Campbell) thinks he may be a childhood romance from St. Petersburg, which casts her own romance into doubt.

The mystery of his arrival never quite clears, though his first conversation with a dear little Russian granny (Irma St. Paule) promises a lot. As Natalia, sharp as a bird in her shawls and fur hat, tries to sell him contraband medicines from the old country, he passes on a strange note. “Please let this woman off the hook,” it says – and later on, when Natalia’s chips are in trouble, it works. While the play remains simple and ambiguous, Mr. Lipkin himself remains off the hook. But once his “angel” tells us he’s the one who lives “when you laugh and dance and dream,” the play nosedives. Maudlin, inexact poetry does, indeed, deserve the hook.

Mr. Melnick, working his cast in figure-eights on Nathan Heverin’s baffling set, can neither avoid cliche nor illuminate it. Saddling his cast with uneven Russian accents is confusing – were they speaking Russian to each other or English? If it was Russian, why use a halting delivery? Mr. Melnick fails to wring exciting images out of his design team, nor did he find a tone and strike it. When, twice in the evening, the cast members begin singing inexpertly, the saccharine accompaniment of a synthesizer undercuts them. What could have been a bizarre, rough interruption falls flat, never quite knowing what aesthetic to pick.