‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ To Play at Regional School

ERMA — The students of Lower Cape May Regional High School will present Tom Stoppard’s audacious and whimsical Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Wed., Dec. 1 through Fri., Dec. 3 at 7 p.m. in the Paul W. Schmidtchen Theatre, Route 9 in Erma.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play about Shakespeare’s Hamlet and asks what would happen if the Great Dane’s familiar story were to be seen through the eyes of two of its very minor characters.
Two of Hamlet’s childhood friends are summoned to Elsinore Castle by Claudius, the newly crowned King of Denmark to lure Hamlet into conversation seeking to discover the cause of his recent melancholy.
His father has just died, his mother has most unexpectedly remarried; Hamlet smells a rat at every turn and he doesn’t trust his childhood friends as far as he can throw them.
In many ways, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is Hamlet in cahoots with Waiting for Godot.
Haplessly, the two friends meet and engage a traveling troop of actors who wax poetic about the nature of illusion, the lot of the actor, and the lengths people will go to get the last say in matters both of the heart and of the soul.
By the time the play reaches its climax, both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have traveled the full range of human emotion and have emerged from their journey unsure of what has happened, how it all came to be, and what it implies about their lifes’ lots in particular and human nature in general.
In essence, the play asks if there is anything particular to an individual life or if a life in general is pretty much the same regardless of time, place, and circumstance.
On-stage seating is limited each evening of performance and admission is five dollars.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is produced and directed by Paul J. Mathis with the special permission of Samuel French, Inc., New York.