Only a few days left, but definitely worth a detour. A great and gutsy production of Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" can be found through sunday at The Culture Project. It's Shakespeare were he alive today, and were he appreciated as much as this sturdy little company does Stoppard's first big success, written when he was 26.

"It costs little to watch, and little more if you happen to get caught up in the action, if that's your taste and times being what they are." (The Player)

Yes.

On a surface level, the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is an absurdist look at two secondary characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Amidst their clever rhetoric, the two characters find themselves (or rather DON'T find themselves) trapped in a fatalistic path leading to their inevitable destruction. Given the universal nature of the play, a director has the ability to extract worldly significance from otherwise ambiguous, yet extremely thought provoking, text.

Daniel Carlton, as the player king, is brilliant, and Jenny Gravenstein and Frederique Nahmani, as Guilderstern and Rosencrantz respectively, are more than worthy of everything their characters are---and are not.