Written by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer

Set Designer: Michel Ostaszewski
Costume Designer: Marija Djordjevic
Lighting Designer: Marty Vreeland
Composer/Sound Designer: Nick Moore

Stage Manager: John Simmons
Assistant Director: Amanda Weir

Starring: Walter Brandes, Zack Calhoon, Avery Clark, Tom Cleary, Noah Crowe, Charles Drexler, David A. Ellis, Jessi Gotta, Catherine Gowl, Chris Kloko, Lawrence Merritt, Aaron Mize, and Matt Stapleton

Tom Stoppard's funny, absurd, and tragic play centers on Hamlet minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in their misadventures and musings enroute to their inevitable end.

In this existentialist play, our heroes are incomplete men, floating in a world they cannot comprehend, and alternately trying to understand it and find diversions to distract themselves from it.

Often compared to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead raises many questions about free will versus determinism and the search for value in life.

Offoffonline.com chose our production as the pick of the week! Here's an excerpt from their rave review:

"In the Milk Can Theater Company's production of Stoppard's 1966 play, action is the name of the game....Director Julie Fei-Fan Balzer shows us a northern kingdom where almost everyone is frantically trying to outrun, outfight, outscrew, or outmaneuver his own fate....the show belongs to the troupe of Players, under the direction of their wry and lascivious pitchman, the Player. Accompanied by drumbeats and noisemakers and juggling and swaggering, these Players of the 'blood, love, and rhetoric school' fill up the stage. Playing kazoos and wearing codpieces, they offer entertainments both over the top and under the covers, if you catch their drift....the Players do the most engaging and enjoyable re-creation of Hamlet 's play-within-a-play, The Murder of Gonzago, that I have ever seen....The title of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead being what it is, the fates of the two hapless courtiers from Shakespeare's most famous tragedy should come as no surprise. But it's a testament to the production that when, as the third act begins to wane and it begins to dawn on the characters (and the audience) that death is how things will end for these two, the effect is heartbreaking."

And, this just in from NYTheatre.com:

"There’s a production of this play just about every season somewhere off-off Broadway, and this is certainly one to have a look at for both Stoppard fans—and those who should be."

To read more about the cast and crew, click here.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was produced at The Michael Weller Theatre,
April 28 - May 14, 2006, in repertory with The Hamlet Plays.