Formerly a Woolworth’s, the Kranzberg Arts Center on Grand is a venue that we have visited many times before, for art shows that have been displayed in its gallery. I never knew that it also housed a theater. Located at the intersection of Olive and Grand, it acts as a gatekeeper between the midtown theater district, with the Fabulous Fox and the ever-expanding St. Louis University campus. The so-called SLU-ification of midtown. Its location reminds me of a Saint Louis centric joke that I heard when I first moved to town: Did you hear about Popeye when he came to town? He went down on Olive and thought that it was Grand. After fifty years it now qualifies as a dad joke, because I had to explain it to you.

This play by Tom Stoppard centers upon two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In that play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are courtiers and former college alums of Hamlet and they become tasked to escort Hamlet to England by his uncle, who after making too much of a nuisance of himself, his uncle orders executed. On the boat ride to England, Hamlet steals the note from his uncle instructing the King of England what to do with Hamlet and substitutes another that names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as the ones to be killed. In Hamlet they both die, giving this play its title.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is an absurdist comedy that Anne aptly likened to Abbott and Costello meet Cheech and Chong. It is what you get when two minor characters think that the world is all about them. There’s an old joke about the actor who is hired to play the gravedigger in Hamlet. “What is the play about?” his wife asks. “It’s about a gravedigger who meets a prince.” Frankly, I could not tell you what this play is about. Maybe, like the TV show Seinfeld, it is about nothing. Other than dialog not much happens. Even this becomes fodder.

We were on time for the show, which started late anyway, but with a sold-out house, we had to climb the rickety stadium seating to the far corner, for the last two available seats. Once seated, the woman sitting next to me offered her assistance in the event of an emergency. Getting up at intermission to use the restroom, I noticed other less adept patrons having to crawl out of their seats. My other complaint had to do with the lighting or lack thereof. Even to get to the seating, we first had to navigate a “stage” littered with props. Thank God that there was no emergency during this show, even if one of the actors yelled fire in the dark. Compared to the rather staid experience of the Rep with its audience full of stuffy old doctors and lawyers it felt quite avant guard.