Emma Tocci/Collegian
Luke Morris might be Rosencrantz, might be Guildenstern.
Emma Tocci/Collegian
Mo Simpson is Rosencrantz.
It was common for the poet or playwright of Shakespeare's time to take a well-known tale, a famed piece of history, or a common theme and reinvent it for a modern re-visitation and reconsideration.
One wonders what the Bard would have thought of the brazen playwright Tom Stoppard's ingenious pillaging of Hamlet in a play called "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," now playing at the Sage Center for the Arts.
The play's director David Griffiths said he has always liked Stoppard's work, and that "Rosencrantz" is a particularly well-suited play for Hillsdale and the Tower Players.
"We've had a reduced rehearsal time, but this play fit well with our schedule," he said.
Set designer Jane Hiett, whose efficient style excellently suggests the play's environments, created the forest, castle and ship required by the action.
Lighting and music, minimal as well, add force and clarity to the production.
As the title characters, seniors Mo Simpson and Luke Morris, both Hillsdale theater veterans, take the bulk of the piece on their shoulders and balance it well.
They are an odd couple, and their combination as actors adds an immediate humor to their roles.
As always, the strength of Simpson's comedic instinct and sense of timing is undeniable, and it should be noted that Morris, whose talent has clearly developed with each play, has achieved a personal high through the straining mind of Guildenstern.
The play, which opened last night, centers on the two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet-his two hapless friends, who are summoned by the villain king of Denmark to discover the source of the prince's apparent lunacy. When a secret letter from the king asking the English king to put Hamlet to death is intercepted, Hamlet rewrites the letter, escapes, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die in his place.
Stoppard capitalizes on the suggestion in Shakespeare's work that these two characters are simply fools of fate, oblivious to what is really happening throughout the play and caught in a series of events that leads to their seemingly meaningless deaths.
As Griffiths notes, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on the verge of knowing they are characters in a play and that they have a fixed destiny that is not a pleasant one. They are both actors in and spectators to their lives.the play is multi-leveled; puns, cross talk, and double entendre play against questions of death and betrayal."
Stoppard puts a comic twilight zone-like plot, and twists into the poet's themes of free will in the face of human error and the possibility of meaning in the face of inevitable death.
At a breaking point, Rosencrantz cries out, "Eternity is a terrible thing! When's it going to end?"
Stoppard weaves these themes with irony and absurdity through the banter of his comic fools. It is a word play of the highest order.
To all fans of the English language, the Players are offer this smorgasbord tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m., and on Sunday at 2 and 8 p.m.
I do believe the Bard himself would have probably laughed aloud.