If by the end of the play the audience doesn’t know what’s going on, neither do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”

Kaitlyn Weber

Tickets are $25 for general admission, $20 for seniors, and $15 for students.

Hastings Middle School
1000 11th St W
Hastings, Minne 55033
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From stacks of boxes, actors query each other on the purpose of death within plays, how to build the audience’s suspension of disbelief and how actors act. They bicker about how the plot of a play can change between arrangements and what melodramatic or tragic purpose a death has in a play where audiences know deep down when the lights go out, the actors will simply stand back up, revived.
This isn’t a seminar on playacting, but a view into Black Dirt Theater’s upcoming play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”
The deeply metatextual absurdist comedy is a take on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” focusing not on that indecisive prince of Denmark, but on his ill-fated friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
While that sounds heady, the play is meant to be accessible even to those unfamiliar with “Hamlet,” or even Shakespeare, because at the end of the day the premise is “what happens when pawns are your main character,” said Taylor Leone, one of the actors who plays Guildenstern.
And those main characters are pawns. In “Hamlet” they are killed offstage from a note they themselves delivered unknowingly. In “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the audience will catch glimpses of the story of “Hamlet,” but focus on the unwitting duo and their ill-fated journey to deliver the message that seals their own fate.
That level of confusion is part of the fun of the play. The main characters not only don’t know what’s going on, but what they are truly doing.
“If by the end of the play the audience doesn’t know what’s going on, neither do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” quipped Kaitlyn Weber, one of the actors who plays Rosencrantz.
Another point of confusion is keeping straight who is Rosencrantz and who is Guildenstern.
A running gag through the play is characters—including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—mixing up which is Rosencrantz and which is Guildenstern. Further highlighting this absurdity is the number of actors playing the lead role.
The play actually features two sets of Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns split between four actors.
According to Director Steve Soler about the decision, the play is meant to represent a broad swath of arrangements across timeframes and actors. The fact that two actors play a single character is yet another meta wink to the audience.
The play “really leans into the comedy of that,” said Soler.
Soler started with Black Dirt in 2011 as stage manager. His directorial debut with Black Dirt was ironically in the 2015 production of “Hamlet.”
Since that time, Soler has watched Black Dirt change and grow: “The personnel has changed but the heart hasn’t changed.”
The community focus of the theater remains especially for shows like “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” The show has the “collaborative heart to it that Black Dirt brings to it,” said Leone.
According to Weber, who has been with the troupe on and off since their very first show “Oklahoma” in 2011, Black Dirt has “changed a lot but hasn’t changed at all.”
Black Dirt’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” play one weekend only running Sept. 25-28 at 7 p.m. and Sept. 28 at 2 p.m. in the Hastings Middle School Auditorium.
Tickets are $25 for general admission, $20 for seniors, and $15 for students.