To his great and delirious joy, my seventeen-year-old son has just been cast as Guildenstern in his high school's spring production of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Probably many of you teachers and writers already know the schtick of this play. The two central characters are minor figures in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the action of Stoppard's play mostly takes place in Hamlet's wings--which is to say, we're supposed to imagine that Hamlet is being performed on the real stage while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is happening offstage.  The other characters in Hamlet make brief appearances in this play, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are mostly confused about what's going on in that drama.

Stoppard's play is often described as "an absurdist, existentialist tragicomedy," and my son wonders how an audience of local parents will react to such a thing (though apparently a few of the teachers are quite excited about it). In our memory, there has never been such weirdness on his high school's stage. Yet the play was first staged in 1966; it's almost a half-century old.

As I was waiting around for a parent-teacher conference yesterday, I overheard banter between two teachers, one of whom was sitting in a chair in the hallway looking at his phone.

Teacher 1: Are you disguising yourself as a parent? 

Teacher 2: What parent would be wearing a tie?

In a way, this conversation sums up the complications of daring to stage a mid-twentieth-century absurdist, existentialist tragicomedy in early twenty-first-century rural America. The simple acquisition of a public school teaching job opens an enormous chasm. Whether or not the people on either side are more or less innocent, more or less insular, more or less patient with strangeness and the unknown, one side wears a tie, and the other does not. So many complications arise: defensiveness and scorn and embarrassment, a tendency to retreat into oneself, or to become a windy blowhard, or to pretend that what we don't know doesn't matter, or to suspect that the outside world is conspiring against us.

In fact, this is exactly how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern feel.