Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
By Tom Stoppard
Directed by Alan Bruun
Starring Tim Williams and Michael Marinaccio
Mad Cow Theatre, Orlando FL</strong>
God may not play dice with the universe, but Tom Stoppard sure does. In the sort of multi-doored room that indicates Hell in a Sartre play, we find Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (Williams & Marinaccio) in a state of quantum indeterminacy. They flip coins, getting a steady stream of heads in what ought to a Gaussian random process, and try to second guess the politics of distant Denmark. Occasionally, players from a competing show uptown drop in and give the pair murky instruction, but no back story. It’s a long wait for these boys; they play tennis with words and lose their capacity for disbelief in flashes of absolutely brilliant comedy that explodes across the acres of plodding dialog. They serve a higher purpose, confident in the importance of their work even if they can’t explain it to themselves. I’m pretty sure there’s a Shakespeare quote covering that somewhere.
In a combination of Noises Off, Waiting for Godot and Hamlet, Williams and Marinaccio triumph in a comedy where both they and the audience long to know what’s really happening. We are backstage in their lives, where the real drama often lurks. William’s cocky self-bluster and Marinaccio’s lost puppy eyes make a bond as close any lover’s, and they pair to the extent that their precise identities are always in flux. The cool and slick Hamlet (Jamie Cline) passes through them, and whiles the three were childhood friends, loyalties have shifted leaving them in the same status as those mysterious people you met in Mafia Wars. The closest Rosencrantz & Guildenstern come to external friendship is via Tragedians lead by the ominous and kohl-eyed Christian Kelty. He provides any variety of entertainment for a fee, whether it be uplifting rhetoric or sleazy carnal thrills. Ruling this incoherent kingdom is Claudius (Bobby Bell). Short in stature and long in hubris, he flashes in and out like the entourage of Michael Jackson or Taylor Dane. His time is short, but he at least feels like he’s accomplishing something: there’s a kingdom to rule and a queen (Elizabeth Judith) to romance.
Stoppard excels at providing theater going audience with subtly insights into mathematics and the philosophy of physics. Here we see probability in action: the potentiality of random events always solidifies at some point, and Schrödinger’s cat lives or dies. What happened to the randomness? It flees constantly into the immediate future leaving us grasping and chanting “woulda, shoulda, coulda.” Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are dead, their deaths just a smallish tragedy. What to the millions of other fatalities mean? Nothing, really, they’re little more than the projection of a Bayesian probability space. But these two were VERY funny just before they kicked off.
For more information on Mad Cow, please visit http://www.madcowtheatre.com
