It’s definitely not hard to find a postmodern take on a Shakespearean work. But it’s hard to find one injected with as much wit and wisdom as Tom Stoppard’s classic, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Though Studio Theater director Kirk Jackson has assembled a pair of convivial leads, a standout supporting player and an inventive set, the star in their latest production is really the work itself.

Stoppard’s famous work focuses on two very minor characters in Hamlet, namely his two friends whom have been summoned to try to jolt Hamlet out of his depressed stupor. In Hamlet, they’re later dispatched to whisk Hamlet off to England, where Hamlet’s devious uncle plans to have him killed. In Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, however, the pair barely know why they’ve showed up on the scene (and at times can’t even differentiate between each other), giving the work the feel of a sort of partial-dream state.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern works best on two levels – when it gives us a sort of backstage pass to the events of Hamlet, and when the title characters take part in some very clever wordplay, always heavy on semantic nuances and verbal tricks. A classic moment is when they engage in a game of Questions, a kind of intellectual tennis game where the two go back and forth, trying to avoid making statements (it’s hilarious to hear the two call each other out on penalties such as “repetition” and “rhetoric,” enough to make you want to try to best your more articulate friends at a round yourself).