Backstage with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

ICCT - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the absurdist tragicomedy from Tom Stoppard opens this weekend at the Riverside Festival Stage in Lower City Park. The Iowa City Community Theatre has never produced the show in their 54 year history although it has been produced in the area before. In fact one of the cast members, Brad Quinn, portrayed Rosencrantz in a previous production, but in ICCT's version, he plays Guildenstern. We had a chance to ask Brad, as well as James Trainor, the director of the show, a few questions.


Brad, you were in another production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead many years ago - when was that?

Brad: Yes, West Side Players did a production of this show back when I was in college. This was before the Festival Stage was even built, but ironically it was in the same park, about 150-200 yards from where the stage is now. And we performed it at around the same time too, at the end of August.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is over 40 years old. How will it relate to modern audiences?

James: Stoppard deals with universal themes in this play. It belong to the "postmodern" school of the 60s that examined the uncertainty of the human condition: whether an individual has an control over his or her destiny, the difficulty of coping with the unknown, the mutability of identity. We're all rational beings in an apparently irrational universe, and the growing awareness of this has played a big part in creating our modern culture. The setting is a popular play by William Shakespeare, which is canon and probably will be for a while. Hamlet still is a familiar text in high schools and colleges, and I think the premise for this play (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are attempting to analyze Hamlet when they've only witnessed a fraction of the action) is a great metaphor for how life takes us by surprise. Plus, it's simply drop-dead funny. Everyone loves a good laugh.

Brad, you know these Rosencrantz and Guildenstern very well...can you compare the two characters? Is one more difficult to play than the other?

Brad: Rosencrantz is not the brightest character, but he has a childlike innocence and curiosity. Guildenstern is smarter, but not as smart as he thinks he is. He's pedantic and blustery. He might be a little harder to play, but that's mostly because he has more lines, especially in the form of short and long speeches, than Rosencrantz has.

James, how has having Brad in the cast, with his experience, helped the show?

James: Brad is a big fan of the show; if I'm not mistaken he was the one who proposed it to the selection committee, and he also backed the idea to put it on the festival stage, which I think was a brilliant idea. Like Brad said, Guildenstern has a lot more lines, which was a struggle at first, but his commitment and passion has carried him through. He really understands the rhythm of the piece as a whole.

There a feeling of complete randomness in this show, perhaps best demonstrated in the famous coin flipping scene - what do you think the play is saying about this aspect of life?

James: There are aspects of the universe that, as much energy as we spend analyzing and understanding them, still baffle our primate brains. When he loses an extremely unlikely string of coin flips, Guildenstern appeals to the idea that "each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does." Mathematicians will tell you that this is obvious, and most of us understand it on some level, but I challenge anyone to actually witness ninety lost coin flips in a row and not be at least a little bit disturbed. Our minds are designed to create tiny models of the universe out of incomplete information. When we encounter something that we can't explain away that doesn't fit into our model, it disturbs us deeply. This is why so much of psychology, religion and art centers around death. We know we're going to die, but we typically don't know when, just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don't know when the string of "heads" is going to end. We don't know what's going to happen; we only know what is likely.

Can you talk a little bit about the character of the Player?

James: The Player serves the purpose of easing this anxiety a little bit. With intelligence and humor, he dismisses fatalistic anxiety as self-indulgent moping. "Uncertainty is the normal state. You're nobody special." If Guildenstern has a tragic flaw, it's thinking too much, insisting the universe conform to his model. In the end, he wastes his life by trying to cling to control. I think Stoppard is saying we need to lighten up a little bit and not take ourselves too seriously. The unknown and the unpredictable are going to ruin our plans at some point, but that's part of life; as a matter of fact, that is life.

Brad: The feeling in this show is one of inevitability. The coins which are flipped all come down heads, which suggests a pattern which cannot be broken. Nothing is random, it's just that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don't understand the factors which are leading them to their ultimate end. This is pretty much exactly like life. Every single thing which happens is determined by that which has occurred previously, it's just that we can't possibly understand the vast amount of information it would take to know why, or what will happen next. And more to the point with this show, you get the idea that all this has happened before, and this shall happen again. And nobody will know any better the next time, either.

Let's switch gears... what has it been like working on the festival stage?

Brad: Hot. Buggy. Damp. I'm not going to lie...it's not ideal for rehearsals. You are at nature's whim. And you really have to up your vocal volume a lot, because there aren't really any walls to bounce the sound back. On the other hand, it has the right feel for this play, especially given it's history as a place to stage Shakespeare. You can almost imagine you came to see a production of Hamlet but ended up on the wrong side of it. And the stage has a nice set of traps which are necessary for this show and hard to find in a space around here.

James: The most exciting part of the production is the fact that we're outside on the festival stage. Not only does it recall the Shakespeare plays that usually take place on the same place, but the atmosphere really feeds into the poetry of some of the language. I like the festival stage because it gives us the opportunity to surround the audience, giving them the feeling that they're part of the world of Elsinore castle. The experience of seeing a villainous king or a clueless ingenue pass you by in the aisle, or hearing a snippet of flute on the wind, does a lot of the work of making the world seem larger. In addition to the aisles, We're using the balcony, the windows, and the trap system. The use of these different areas helps separate the world of Hamlet from the world of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ... who basically aren't allowed to leave the main playing area. I love this space because it has different levels built in, and set dressing can be minimalist or completely absent.

Who else in the cast?

James: Rosencrantz is played by David Priebe. The Player is played by Ed Henry and Hamlet is played by Matthew James. The ensemble cast is rounded out by Elizabeth Breed, Mary Ann Cozine, Paula Grady, Susan Jacobson, Greg Kilberger, Dennis Lambing, Emily Larson, Nick Ostrem, Ariane Parkes-Perret, Noah Parks and Brian Tanner.

How are things going with rehearsals?

James: Everyone is doing a wonderful job, and has brought some really engaging stuff to the table. The two titles characters in this play have a lot of verbal and physical work to do, and David and Brad have done it with nearly tireless energy and creativity. However, this play could simply not be done without a equally versatile and talented ensemble. My conceit is that Hamlet, who is taken out of context here, should be truly crazy, and the Hamlet people have done a wonderful job of creating a bizarre and zany world. Likewise, the band of players encountered on the road have been fleshed out and have a lot of fun physical business and present an intriguing play-within-a-play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves have a lot of stage time, but I think of this as an ensemble show. I've never seen actors who don't have a single line to speak work so hard.

What new discovery did you make about the show through the rehearsal process?

James: I've learned a lot. When I looked at the play on paper, I thought it was a very intelligent and funny examination of some of the philosophical ideas I talked about earlier. I looked it as a parody of Waiting for Godot, except that Vladimir and Estragon happened to be in Hamlet. I learned pretty quickly that "happened to be in Hamlet" means a dozen people, and all the challenges that comes with scheduling, blocking and teching. I'd never really done a lot of physical comedy before, but I've had a blast creating the environment, and now the interruptions and interjections by these absurd characters are some of my favorite bits.

Brad: Tom Stoppard is smart. He's smarter than me, and he's probably smarter than whoever is reading this. And because of this, I literally find something new every single time I go through the play. I found this to be true of the other Stoppard show I was in, Rock and Roll at TCR last fall, as well. He doesn't bother explaining anything to his audience, he expects you to be able to figure it out on your own. Which actually presents an interesting dichotomy within the play, as it uses several scenes from Hamlet within the text. And as you know, Shakespeare loved to have his characters give long speeches explaining everything to the audience. Hamlet even has a version of itself within itself to further explain it to the audience in case they didn't get it, a fact which is played with in this show to hilarious result. But as an audience member for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, you'd better pay attention and think if you don't want to get lost. Or better yet, see it multiple times. I guarantee you will get more out of it every single time you see it.


The show opens Friday, September 3 at 7:30 pm at the Riverside Festival stage in Lower City Park. For more information, go here.