Word: hamlets
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Fortunately, most of the cast avoids the kind of overacting that could push Cain's overdirecting into disaster. Henry Wolonicz as Hamlet in particular surpasses the direction, creating a sympathetic and consistent prince even in the midst of Cain-created confusion...
...Stoppard's play "two of the most marginal characters in Shakespeare"--the pair of characterless spy-schoolfellows who conspire with Claudius against the Prince--occupy center stage, talking arguing and waiting while the action of Hamlet swirls incomprehensibly around them...
Coupling the two shows is by no means unheard of, and one director recently combined the two into a six-hour marathon. It is still a winning combination, carried out smoothly by the BSC. Most of the cast is identical for the two shows, with the disappointing exception of Hamlet himself, and selected routines evoke one show in the midst of another--notably, the first entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet, in which the two, with more snap and individuality than such small parts would otherwise command, silently go through one of Stoppard's coin-flipping routines...
Likewise, the finest moment in Rosencrantz occurse when Hamlet, having rushed onstage (to R and G's usual befud-dlement), begins delivering a soliloquy to the theater's rear wall, and the parallel strikes home: When the Prince delivered that soliloquy in his own play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were upstage of him, seeing only his back. The audience has been placed entirely within the spies perspectives as minor characters within a larger show, summoned mysteriously from a place they cannot remember on a mission they cannot understand...
Upon this connection the rest of the play falls into place. And in the picture which it creates, Hamlet too takes on a clarity and reality than it could not realize if confined to Cain's relentless search for meanings in the unfathomably rich script. The "straight" interpretation of the Shakespeare that frames Stoppard's whimsy clashes oddly at times with the fanciful variations of Cain's direction, but no matter. This is what imaginative repertory ought to be--two plays that share everything and yet nothing, each distorting, reflecting, and illuminating the other...