Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Opening Night: January 28, 2014
Closing: February 1, 2014
Theater: The Pearl Theater
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern centers on the misadventures and musings of two minor characters—childhood friends of the Prince—from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is structured as the inverse of Hamlet; the title characters are the leads, not supporting players, and Hamlet himself has only a small part. The duo appears on stage in this play when they are off-stage in Shakespeare’s play, with the exception of a few short scenes in which the dramatic events of both plays coincide. Focusing on free will vs. determinism, the search for value and the impossibility of certainty, the play has a love for cleverness and language, treating it as a confounding system fraught with ambiguity to engage and delight the audience.
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January 13, 2014
The Acting Company’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead plays in rep with Hamlet (naturally). However, it could just as soon be a companion piece for Waiting for Godot. In upgrading the melancholy Dane’s chums from bit players to protagonists with existential crises of their own almost 50 years ago, a young, astute Tom Stoppard built on existing plays while crafting one very much his own, as he demonstrated that fear of “not being” starts early in life.
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January 27, 2014
Plays in rep are all the rage this season. The Acting Company offers two plays performed on the exact same set (on the stage of the Pearl Theatre), with the exact same play worlds: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. While the former is the bard’s tragedy of a moody Danish prince, the latter tells this story from the perspective of its two least important characters: Hamlet’s Wittenberg University pals, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It’s an ambitious pairing that offers a robust view of the play that many consider Shakespeare’s finest.
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January 21, 2014
Dear Rosencrantz. Gentle Guildenstern. The Prince of Denmark’s old school friends have been popping up around town in this Shakespeare-soaked season, though usually they stay in the background, onlookers and minor players amid the brooding and bloodshed of “Hamlet.”
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