I see dead people

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: an existential afterlife

by Robert von Stein Redick

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead runs through August 11 at the Maine Shakespeare Festival, Bangor Waterfront. Call 942-3333.

R & G: Michael Weiselberg and Patrick Zeller are lifeless, in a good way.

To the home crowd, it is nothing unusual: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the best-known play by the most acclaimed Western playwright since Beckett, is about to begin on a soggy stage in a grassy corner of the Bangor waterfront. To me it is a shock to the senses. The wind is cold, and threatens another downpour; extras swab the stage with towels; the warm-up act, a virtuoso fire-flinging juggler, takes a hard fall. I am distraught. They can't seriously be going ahead!

But the regular patrons of the Maine Shakespeare Festival are all serene. They've come in raincoats and rubbers, toting thermoses and folding chairs, merry as a noontime beach crowd. As our umbrellas jostle, the juggler stands up in his little puddle, brushes himself off, and adds a unicycle to his act. Defiance seems the watchword of the evening.

From the shelter of the set's central arch -- or rather, the modest arch that, along with two staircases, is the set -- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern peer glumly out at the drizzle. The former has a boy's face and Beatles moptop; the latter curling sideburns and starved wolfhound eyes. Their faces say genial fratboy; their vests and jodhpurs place them somewhere between Elizabethan England and Star Trek. When one starts flipping coins and the other pocketing them, no one is quite sure whether the show has begun.

All this is perfectly appropriate. Stoppard's Tony-Award winning play is about the flimsiness of identity, and the arbitrariness of fate. A frustrated Guildenstern (Michael Weiselberg) flips coin after coin: an embarrassed Rosencrantz (Patrick Zeller) wins every time, for the result is always heads. "It must be indicative of something, besides the redistribution of wealth," Guildenstern muses. Indeed it is, but he can't be allowed to see it.

We see it, soon enough -- if we've brushed up our Shakespeare, or even attended the previous night's Hamlet (the shows appear on alternating nights, with the same casts). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the most minor characters of Shakespeare's tragedy. Once Hamlet's schoolmates, they have grown into twin fools, dispatched hither and yon by the royal family, manipulated, ignored, and eventually beheaded. Do notice the pun.

Stoppard's play might best be described as the Rod Serling Hamlet. Where do characters go, after all, when their actors exit stage right and swig Gatorade? How do they leapfrog over scenes they don't appear in? And what if they're flat, "unrounded," mere tools of a larger plot? Messrs. R. and G., we gradually discern, are just such a pair of unfortunates: two pawns that spring to life when the prince approaches, and dangle helplessly when he is gone. Devoid of memory but stuffed with abstract theories, they stand also for every contemporary worry about the limits to free will and the slipperiness of choice.

Happily, Stoppard never philosophizes without a snicker, so the pair's existential groans become a sort of Vaudevillian duel:

"Shouldn't we be doing something -- constructive?"

"What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?"

"Why should it matter?"

"What does it matter why?"

"Doesn't it matter why it matters?"

"What's the matter with you?"

Zeller and Weiselberg do not always give such lines their due: some of the denser jokes slither out reluctantly, followed by looks of relief. Nor is it clear that director Jenna Ware's production much honors the sting in Stoppard's comedy. Like Beckett's straw men in Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are caught in a double bind. They are hopelessly unreal. And they are quite real enough to suffer from the knowledge. Little of that dark urgency inhabits this production.

True, we catch a whiff of it as Hamlet (Erik Gratton) and the rest of the Danish court storm in and out, brushing the pair aside like mannequins ("Why can't we go by them?" demands Rosencrantz miserably). The royal family is cryptic and aloof; only Gratton has a chance to distinguish himself. His Hamlet is an appealing narcissist; the clothes and swagger evoke a '50s greaser, but his eyes shine with impish evil as he plots his old chums' murder. Gratton earns another distinction this week when he becomes the first actor in history to play both Hamlet and a barnyard animal on a single day (he is Wilbur the pig in Charlotte's Web, through August 6).

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have another distraction besides the naughty prince: those other sidelined Hamleteers, the "wandering players," join them in offstage limbo. Only the lead player (Celia Madeoy) has a talking role; her five subordinates are underexploited and might well have profited from a few more weeks of choreographing. Madeoy herself has as much energy as the rest of the cast combined, and she deploys it ferociously: "Death for all ages and occasions!" she offers, hawking her repertoire. "Death by suspension, convulsion, consumption, incision, execution, asphyxiation, and malnutrition!" Her devotion to melodrama balances the hopeless hunger for real action on the principles' part.

But it also, sadly, highlights the unmet challenge. The playwright snickers at his fools, but always with tender sympathy. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are false men with real agonies. Strong as its many aspects are, Ware's production never confronts this essential paradox. As a result, when our fall guys fall at last, it's hard to imagine many in that weatherproofed crowd thinking "Ouch."

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.