The closing moments of CityStage Ensemble's production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are ripe for a rendition of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." After all, director Dan Hiester bills his production as "[British playwright Tom] Stoppard's comedy with a holiday twist." Given that no discernible holiday references appear elsewhere in the show, the decision to sing a well-chosen Christmas carol would allow Hiester to make good on his advertised promise. What's more, attaching one more extraneous piece of music to the play would be in keeping with the director's cut-and-paste treatment of Stoppard's brilliant script.
Rosencrantz (S.B. Nielson) and Guildenstern (Petra Ulrych) are two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet whose king and queen (Hamlet's stepfather and mother) command them to get to the bottom of Hamlet's anguished mental state. They follow their monarchs' orders to the letter, only to receive an all-too-final reward for their efforts: Like many characters in the Bard's tragedy, they wind up dead.
But that's where the action starts in Stoppard's play, which begins just after R&G have crossed over into the Great Unknown. To pass the time, they flip coins that always turn up "heads" no matter how avidly they try to affect the outcome. As the pair wonders aloud where and, indeed, who they are, a group of traveling actors enters. They re-enact scenes from Hamlet, a clever theatrical device that Stoppard implements to explain who R&G are. When performed as written, the play is often as terrifying as it is witty, and our preconceived notions of reality get thrown up in the air. Unfortunately, Hiester has made some changes to the play's structure that are more confusing than they are enlightening.
It's difficult to judge how much Hiester has cut the play, since in his version the nine characters from Hamlet that are usually played by nine different actors are absorbed by the six wandering minstrels (who assume the Shakespearean roles in addition to their own scripted parts). Also, several of the traveling players swap Hamlet roles in mid-scene, causing us to wonder who's who and what's what throughout the evening. Furthermore, though Nielson and Ulrych perform Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for most of the show, other actors sometimes play those parts as well.
The play's locales are given a similarly baffling treatment, as the performers pull painted backdrops across the rear wall of the stage to indicate changes of time and place. Presumably, this device is also meant to indicate when the actors are performing Stoppard's play and when they're taking on Shakespeare's work--an idea that's never as clear as Hiester wants it to be. Complicating matters further, strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony inexplicably form unnecessary musical bridges between acts and scenes. And though Hiester's production is sometimes witty and entertaining, the director fails to elicit and clarify Stoppard's well-orchestrated points along the way. Or, as one character aptly remarks, "Incidents--all we get are incidents."
There are, admittedly, no easy answers to the questions Stoppard asks about life and death, and a director could therefore make a case for a production that is intentionally ambiguous. But there's a difference between a play that's asking difficult questions and a production that makes those questions more difficult to understand by adding its own commentary on top of the playwright's. Hiester may aspire to illuminating a great play with his "ensemble" approach, but the result is little more than a classroom exercise that ultimately fails to engage our thinking.
--Lillie
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, through December 21 at the Theatre at Jack's, 1553 Platte Street, 433-8082.
