How do you put on a play when everyone already knows the ending? That's one key question, the first of many, which hovers quietly over the Tufts production of Tom Stoppard's play, "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead."
Stoppard gained international fame for daring to mess with the play of all plays, Shakespeare's "Hamlet," dragging Hamlet out of the spotlight and replacing him with two of drama's most forgettable characters: servants Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Now the play, in all its existential glory and wit, is back at Tufts for the drama department's winter show. Directed by Department of Drama and Dance instructor Sheriden Thomas, "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" tells the story of Hamlet's faithful but hopelessly confused servants, two characters almost as bewildered to find themselves on stage as we are to see them put there.
Part of the appeal of "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern" is that it not only allows one to look at familiar characters in a different light, but that it forces one to consider how any work relates to all those works which came before. "It's an homage to 'Waiting for Godot' mixed in with 'Hamlet,'" Thomas said.
That means that one of the first and most difficult problems for the cast was to confront characters that the audience has already seen over and over.
"It was really intimidating," said senior Kasey Collins, who plays Hamlet. "I want to play the Hamlet that people are expecting me to be."
In fact, "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern" contains many lines of Shakespeare's original dialogue interlaced with Stoppard's own, presenting a challenge in terms of fluidity and cohesion. "It was like we were rehearsing two different plays," said Thomas. "It's a two-hander and a big ensemble piece at the same time."
But there's something valuable in those breaks in cohesion. One of the things that make this play so compelling is its almost overwhelming transparency and self-consciousness, meaning that at nearly every moment, both audience and actor are aware of who they are and what they are doing.
"There are specific points when we're asked to break the fourth wall," said senior Joel Perez, who plays the Player, a traveling actor. "Sometimes, we look at people straight in the eye. It can be unnerving."
"It's usually in response to death," added senior Katherine Round, who plays another member of the band of traveling actors. Indeed, the play often responds to death in one way or another, especially with its fateful end embedded in the title and looming ever closer.
If "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern" is about death, then it is also about time, as the two are inevitably intertwined. Thomas and her cast have capitalized on that theme, making the conscious decision to keep time at center stage. Even setting and sound work as a continual reminder of time's importance; the background is a huge mural of the insides of a clock, and a sinister ticking follows the characters from the play's start.
"Tom Stoppard once said that all stories in the end are about time," Thomas said. "This play is about time or about how time had stopped."
Curiously, while time in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern" goes slowly, the end comes quickly, which is just one of the many paradoxes that make the play resonate.
"It's challenging because it has so many layers," said sophomore Emily Code, who plays Rosencrantz. "It's an existential comedy."
"The darkness sort of creeps up on you," Round added. Indeed, even when we laugh- and we do, often- it is a laugh of recognition because despite knowing how it all ends, we are as lost as the characters and see ourselves going along with them on an impossible journey toward an unfair end.
There's a fluidity of identity carried throughout, between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who switch names back and forth often), between characters and actors, and between actors and us. It's barely a push to let the play explore gender identity as well, and with a predominantly female cast, Thomas brings this last question into focus.
"The talent pool that showed up was mostly female," Thomas said, explaining why she chose to cast females for Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and even Hamlet. "But I also wanted to give everyone a fair shake. Most major productions have mostly male roles." What might have started as a casting challenge has turned into an apt expression of the diminishing boundaries that embody the play.
Whatever else it may be, in the end, "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead" is a comedy and a sharp one. Even in its most uncomfortable moments, it's great fun. One character in the play remarks, "We are tied down to a language that makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style." But for Stoppard, obscurity is its own style, and for two hours at least, style is more than enough.
