Word: guildensterne
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TRAVESTIES. Playwright Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers) spews wit, wordplay, paradox and thought like tracer bullets, and, in a performance of indelible virtuosity, John Wood sees that every bullet is dead on target...
...SCRIPT IS full of comic routines and caustic one-liners. Humor is the basis of the characters' lives, providing them with accurate insight and comfortable escape. Norman, the straight mathematician, and Shelley, his spacey girlfriend, are clearly self-parodies. Mike and Cootie, a Rosenkrantz-and-Guildenstern type duo, are careful, conscious performers. But other characters are confused about the interpretation of their lines. When Kathy has problems with her boyfriend, she complains...
Exile, to some degree, is Stoppard's abiding theme. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is exile through ignorance. The two mini-heroes do not understand Hamlet or Elsinore. Junipers is exile from God. No one can clearly divine his purposes or verify his existence. Travesties is exile by intent, a rebellion against social traditions and aesthetic norms. Travesties, a play-within-a-monologue, begins with the age-frazzled Carr (John Wood) reminiscing intimately about the famed Zurich trio in a way that illustrates a perennial travesty: the ravages of time on memory. What follows is part vaudeville, part nonstop...
...find a playwright whose work I liked." Then he was sent Teeth, a television comedy by an unknown named Tom Stoppard. Wood played a cuckolded dentist who turned his rival's teeth green. Shortly afterward, Wood starred on Broadway in Stoppard's first stage hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Establishment again beckoned; the RSC had asked Wood four times before he agreed to join them. To his relief, "they accepted me completely." The RSC is now home. He can do what he wants: an iconoclastic Brutus in 1972, then the suave, icy Sherlock Holmes last year...
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. So far, this has proved to be the most durable play to be written in the sixties. Like Shakespeare, it manages to be both an actor's and an audience's play at the same time. R & G really isn't about anything, except maybe words and appearance and reality, and some other things that would sound like the gamut of modern drama cliches if they weren't so funny onstage. It should really be taken in like a dose of laughing gas--without thinking about anything, just relaxing yourself into a body-wide grin. This...