The Arts

Twists on classic themes, now playing on local stages:

'Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead'

Originally staged at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" dares to turn the appalling body count in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" into the basis for an existential comedy.

Seattle Public Theater adds yet another twist: the central characters are played by women. While Stoppard is no stranger to gender-bending (he won an Oscar for co-

writing "Shakespeare in Love"), could this be one twist too many?

It takes a while to get your bearings, partly because the show is already a narrative challenge — it's a play within a play within a play — but the audience is invited to share and even celebrate that complexity. Stoppard is a master when it comes to dramatizing word games and posing unanswerable questions about God, consciousness and death.

The title characters are clownish childhood friends of Hamlet, played with delightful twin-style timing by Angela DiMarco (Rosencrantz) and Alyssa Keene (Guildenstern). They're first seen betting on coin flips, puzzled that they've come up with "heads" 92 times in a row. Could a supernatural force be involved?

It seems as good a theory as any, especially when a traveling troupe of actors turns up to present "The Murder of Gonzago," a theatrical property they have blithely "pirated from the Italian." But it also seems to have something to do with dark doings in Denmark.

Not that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern understand the brief glimpses of the Hamlet story that they witness. All they really know is "we were sent for." And as the title suggests, what they don't know can be a problem.

The director, Shana Bestock, gives another important role, The Player, to a woman (Heather Hawkins), who almost can't help dominating the show with her rowdy wit. While the role is usually played by a man (Richard Dreyfuss did it in Stoppard's 1990 movie version), Hawkins transforms it into her own personal firecracker.

Through Feb. 19 by Seattle Public Theater at the Bathhouse, 7312 W. Green Lake Drive N., Seattle; $15-$29, (206-524-1300 or www.seattlepublictheater.org)

John Hartl, special to The Seattle Times

'Thebes'

Assumptions are best left at the door when attending Kristina Sutherland's new penetrating drama-comedy, "Thebes."

What appears at first to be a familiar story of an Iraq war veteran returning home to confront post-traumatic stress — within a family that doesn't try very hard to understand what she's been through — is ultimately more expansive.

Like the Thebes of ancient Greek tragedies, a city rife with family squabbles having monumental consequences, there are overlapping domestic and political power struggles afoot in the small American town of Sutherland's story.

Set shortly before a mayoral election with peculiar, secretive overtones, "Thebes" finds 21-year-old vet Erica (Katherine Grant- Suttie) discharged early (and mysteriously) from the U.S. Army.

She arrives unexpectedly at her family home to unwanted surprises: Her father (Robert Hankins) has moved out without explanation; her preoccupied mother, Mary (Denise Fleener), is running for mayor; and her placid sister, Amelia (Meaghan Halverson), is barely repressing seething emotions.

If it sounds like Sutherland is working on a troubled-soldier cliché — i.e., Erica exploding like a grenade in her old life — she reveals instead a much broader picture of a political family's fault lines. At a time when Republican primaries have peeled back candidates' private lives to expose a few unsavory histories, Mary's delusional march toward her own and her family's very public self- destruction feels spot-on.

Director Alexis Holzer juggles many tricky elements — time compression, memory, a busy Greek chorus espousing platitudes and paranoia — while the strong cast keeps it all engrossing. The technical crew pulls off impressive moments of reality morphing spookily into fantasy.

"Thebes" makes an interesting companion piece with Sutherland's 2009 "Nancy, Frank and Joe" (cowritten with Desiree Prewitt), another intersection of family dysfunction and enterprise, history and mythmaking. The playwright has made that interesting equation a rich vein to mine.

Through Feb. 11, Theatre Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Ave. S., Seattle; $15-$18 (800-838-3006 or www.brownpapertickets.com)

Tom Keogh, special to The Seattle Times