At Studio, a Player Steals Show From Stoppard's 'Dead' Heads

Floyd King, center, exudes impish delight even as Raymond Bokhour, left, and Liam Craig lack chemistry in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." (By Scott Suchman -- Studio Theatre)

He's not Rosencrantz. Nor is he Guildenstern. Still, when Floyd King makes his entrance in the supporting role of the Player, Studio Theatre's perfunctory revival of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" suddenly becomes significant.

King is gloriously in his comfort zone here, portraying the grand traveling actor in Tom Stoppard's piquantly philosophical upending of "Hamlet." Wearing a pencil-thin mustache and jacket with the texture of brothel wallpaper, he looks like some itinerant croupier in search of a roulette wheel.

The portrayal is suave, funny and magically wistful in ways that speak to the ontological games at the heart of the play. An impish delight in witty exchange, in reducing refined forms of metaphysics to brisk comedy, is essential to the success of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." In asking the existential question -- what the heck are we all doing here? -- the play, like Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," wants in some sense to make a joke of our knowledge of death, wants to score points off our puniness in the universe.

Making this work requires urbanity, the quality King embodies here and the thing that is lacking in much of the rest of Kirk Jackson's production -- Studio's entry in the Shakespeare in Washington festival, which ends next month. Yes, the playwright's brilliant wordplay can itself be a minefield: Consider the unwatchable 1990 movie version. But what's crucially absent in the Studio revival is something fundamental to the play: a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who can make us feel we're all in this together.

The deficiency in Raymond Bokhour's Rosencrantz and Liam Craig's Guildenstern has to do with chemistry: They don't have much. Bokhour has an idea of a character, a guileless Rosencrantz who trains his wide eyes on anyone who can shed light on his predicament. Craig's placid countenance is more of a problem. He never engagingly takes on the language, or fully convinces us of the cruel irony of the characters' situation.

The situation being, of course, one of the most captivatingly inventive in modern drama. In this 1967 play -- an early breakthrough for Stoppard -- "Hamlet" is reborn as a platform for two of its sorriest marginal characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, you may recall, are school chums of Hamlet enlisted by Claudius to spy on his stepson. Their duplicity is paid in kind. After popping up here and there, they go to their ignominious rewards. The ultimate insult is that they don't even get death scenes. Shakespeare does them in offstage.

Still, as the Player observes, "Every exit is an entrance somewhere else." In Stoppard's play, it's the vaporous world of the minor character -- an ethereal greenroom -- into which we enter. There, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the stars, sentient beings who don't realize they are mere characters in a play.

At brief intervals, the major characters of "Hamlet" emerge from behind doors and panels, skillfully devised by set designer Daniel Conway to resemble the walls of Elsinore. These episodes are the only times Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are relieved of their virtually ceaseless hand-wringing over what they're doing here and what's in store for them: The lines from "Hamlet" come to them instinctively.

In Studio's version, the scenes out of Shakespeare are unconvincing. It's as if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were not refugees from an alternate reality, but from summer stock. (The "Hamlet" actors are in modern dress, one of several nods in the production to the style of the forthcoming "Hamlet" with Jeffrey Carlson at Shakespeare Theatre Company.) The woodenness evaporates anytime King and his merry band of actors materialize. Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are pushed front and center, so does the traveling theater troupe (hired by Hamlet) achieve a more prominent part in Stoppard's play. Unlike Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however, the Player has some depth of understanding of their precarious condition, even if he's thoroughly happy treading water in the world of make-believe.

The outlines of the stage even seem to have more definition when King is on hand. (One exception to the lackluster staging: the finely mimed swordplay, to a clever accompaniment, between King and Dan Istrate, portraying a member of the troupe.) You know, though, that things are not clicking when, near the end of the evening, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get hold of a letter describing their deaths, and the shock and sadness the news should bring have no claim on them, or us. If at such a poignant moment the jolt isn't major, then everything that has gone into it feels minor.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Kirk Jackson. Lighting, Michael Phillipi; costumes, Alex Jaeger; sound, Neil McFadden. With Miles Butler, Theo Hadjimichael, Nick Stevens, Tim Lueke, Marshall Elliott, McKenzie Bowling, Dan Manning, Maura McGinn, Kevin Sockwell. About 2 hours 20 minutes. Through June 24 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. Call 202-332-3300 or visit http://www.studiotheatre.org.