Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

**Teatro LATEA**
(Clemens Soto Velez Cultural Center)
New York, NY
2002
Funny and off kilter, Tom Stoppard’s play takes two of Shakespeare’s minor players and makes them “deep” philosophical thinkers who are lost trying to navigate their way through the backstabbing Royal Court of Denmark. Filled with brilliant word play and genuinely funny repartee, **Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead** is probably Stoppard’s most famous play.
Confluence Theatre Company presents the 35th anniversary production of this Neo-Elizabethan-Goth-Punk play within a play.

I was sitting around my apartment one night, and my mind drifted to the topic of set design. It's something I'd always wanted to do, but never had. "How does one get started?" I wondered. "Guess it's one thing you'll never do."

The next day, mayhaps the day after, I got an email from Brian (aka Rosencrantz) asking if I was interested in doing sets for their upcoming production. I wrote back that his sensitive Pisces antennae must have been up, and the rest is (many hours of hard but enthusiastic work later) history. Sound design got added to the mix.

Many thanks to everyone in Confluence who helped make it all possible.

Set & Sound Design

Stage view from the audience

“I have no desires. None. There was a messenger... that's right. We were sent for. Syllogism the second: one: probability is a factor which operates within natural forces. Two, probability is not operating as a factor. Three, we are now within un-, sub- or supernatural forces.”

Compass

“I'm assuming nothing. The position as I see it, then. That's west unless we're off course, in which case it's night; the king gave me the same as you, the king gave you the same as me: the king never gave me the letter, the king gave you the letter, we don't know what's in the letter…”

Platform and screen

“If we postulate, and we just have, that within un-, sub- or supernatural forces the probability is that the law of probability will not operate as a factor, then we must accept that the probability of the first part will not operate as a factor, in which case the law of probability will operate as a factor within un-, sub- or supernatural forces…”

Rathole and bench

“An awakening, a man standing on his saddle to bang on the shutters, our names shouted in a certain dawn, a message, a summons... A new record for pitch and toss. We have not been.. picked out... simply to be abandoned... set loose to find our own way... We are entitled to some direction...”

Skull and bench

“We can't afford anything quite so arbitrary. Nor did we come all this way for a christening. All that - preceded us. But we are comparatively fortunate; we might have been left to sift the whole field of human nomenclature, like two blind men looting a bazaar for their own portraits...“

Tragedian’s cart

“Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive. We transport you into the world of intrigue and illusion... faithless wives and ravished virgins - flagrante delecto at a price, but that comes under realism for which there are special terms.”

Rosencrantz

Portrayed by Brian Barefoot

Guildenstern

Portrayed by Marie Eléna O'Brien

Confluence Theatre Company was founded in the summer of 2000 by a group of newly graduated students of Point Park College's Conservatory of Performing Arts. Confluence's inaugural production, a pair of one-act plays packaged as "Durang vs. Ives: Clash of the Titans," played to sold-out houses, and the magazine "TimeOut New York" highlighted it as a "Critic's Pick of the Week."

Exhibitions (etc) > Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Set & Sound Design