ROSENCRANTZ AND Guildenstern Are Dead is a play about death in more ways than one. Proceeding at the pace of a funeral dirge, its funniest lines are shrouded in sepulchral solemnity, while its supposedly climactic soliloquies are greeted, by a flurry of unsolicited chuckles. When Rosencrantz, after discovering Hamlet's forged letter ordering the pair's execution, sighs woefully, "To tell you the truth, I'm relieved," most of the audience chortles in agreement.

The 1967 London and Broadway hit that catapulted an obscure Tom Stoppard to fame and chic respectability, Rosencrantz focuses on the bewildering world of the two minor characters in Hamlet and their hellish and condemned existence in a play they do not understand. A madcap Danish prince reels drunkenly in and out, a tossed coin falls on "heads" 92 times in a roll, distracted characters enter and exit without explanation.

"There is a logic," protests a defiant Guildenstern at one point, but it is one they will never understand, for their only part is to play their part. And their only repose from doubt and uncertainty, the Go dot they ultimately wait for, is death. Death is an exit, and as the Player puts it, an exit is merely an entrance to somewhere else. Life, on the other hand, "is a gamble at terrible odds," and sometimes you lose 92 times in a roll.

BECKETT-LIKE non-sequiturs garbed in Shakespearean soliloquies this play may be--what more winning combination--yet however lavish the praise it has garnered, a main part of this production's problems lie within the play itself. A full-scale production of it is simply too long. And even the much-touted tensile strength of its brilliant wordplay and verbosity cannot sustain such ceaseless action. Compounded with this intrinsic difficulty is director Jeff Melvoin's decision to present the play at a grinding, almost gesture-tableau pace. Muffled by the heavy directorial hand, ordered to understatement, most of the actors are left to gratuitous pouting and postured gestures. The only actor who reaches any level of energy is the Player (Tim House), and he is supposed to be histrionic.

In Melvoin's superb fall production of Philadelphia Here I Come, the overlapping ambiguity between the two characters who play the schizophrenic selves of one person made for a rich interplay. Melvoin has consciously chosen to differentiate very clearly the two main characters in Rosencrantz. Jeff Rubin as Rosencrantz plays a good Yiddish Sancho Panza character who alternates between dawdling silliness and self-indignant outrages over nothing. But our comic response is much more problematic towards Guildenstern (Steve O'Donnell), played as a brooding almost Hamlet-like character who utters Stoppard's lines dripping with metaphysical existentialisms as if they were completely serious and without a hint of self-parody. Stoppard had meant the pair to be anonymous, not-too-bright. Everyman figures, but as played here the frequent confusion between the pair's names becomes a rather superficial joke routine.

AS IN PHILADELPHIA, Melvoin's specialty is the rapid-fire repartee. Rubin and O'Donnell are a brilliant duo when let loose. And in a word-spitting duel like the Questions Game (where each must retort with a question), the verbal fireworks are dazzling. Chris Minkowski, a properly regal Claudius, looks like he's still savoring his triumph as last fall's production of Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound. The mimed deaths of the Tragedians, choreography by David Fechtor, resemble the last writhing gasps of fish drowning in air, and coordinate well with the heavy rope-netting of the set.

The Hamlet plot has always been an archetypal sources for playwrights. As diverse writers as Goethe (Clavigo), Chekhov (Seagull), W.S. Gilbert (who wrote a play let in which Rosencrantz and Ophelia are secret lovers). Philip LaZebnik '75 (whose Mad About Mintz not only parodies Hamlet but is riddled with themes of death), and Paris Barclay '78 (whose ambitious though now moribund production of Niccolo & The Prince featured Hamlet as a major--character), all have pirated shamelessly from Shakespeare.

Though a production bordering on the tedious, the Loeb's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--a mere pilferage from Hamlet of 250 lines--is certainly no crime, and often redeemed by Stoppard's scattered touches of antic lunacy.