In Tom Stoppard’s 1967 play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” two slightly bumbling courtiers, former childhood friends of Hamlet of Denmark, are summoned by his usurping uncle, now stepfather, Claudius and his mother Gertrude to discover the cause of Hamlet’s strange behavior.

As the play opens, Stoppard expertly creates the sense of having stumbled into a skewed version of both the backside of Shakespeare’s tragedy and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” as the audience is immediately introduced to the play’s two main characters.

In Whidbey Island Center for the Arts’ current production, they set the tone dressed as two teenaged 1960s-era Beatles look-a-likes on a minimalist set of multi-leveled platforms.

Waiting for what seems an eternity for someone to tell them what to do or where to go, Rosencrantz (Max Cole-Takanikos) and Guildenstern (Kenton Therien) proceed to journey into an existential exercise in passing the time offstage from the Elizabethan drama, with an odds-defying coin toss and hours of mind-boggling but highly entertaining word play, among other distractions.

Stoppard is a master of the witty, wordy tête-á-têtes which these two actors handle well, though the opening night jitters were apparent throughout the first act for most of the cast.

The cryptic conversations between the two unheroic characters lead always to a discussion of their own fates, which are ever oppressively elusive.

Such discussions subsequently cause a panic in the struggling-to-be-rational brain of Guildenstern, while perpetually bouncing off the unruffled back of the mellow and seemingly obtuse Rosencrantz.

Therien and Cole-Takanikos are both well cast, Therien’s natural coltish physicality lending itself to the fierce intellectual nerdiness of Guildenstern, and Cole-Takanikos’ good natured easiness making Rosencrantz unrelentingly endearing.

Cole-Takanikos, like the somewhat unrelaxed Therien, started out a bit too quiet of voice initially, which came off as more unsure than unflappable.

But, impressively, both actors found their stride by the second act when they pumped up the level of desperation bearing down on these bewildered boys.

By the play’s end, Cole-Takanikos especially revealed several dimensions of a character who may seem simple of both mind and personality on paper, but like Guildenstern, is not. This is the genius of Stoppard.

Linear and long though it is, the play is intriguing with it’s momentary forays into the tragedy of “Hamlet” that remains always on the periphery with its snatches of the original dialogue and its players providing various iotas of hope or purpose for the two unsuspecting fools.

Eric Mulholland gives an excellent performance as the brooding Hamlet, showing a complicated barometer of madness that hits several notes on a scale that bounces between vengeful, downtrodden and downright creepy.

Zora Lungren, with just a smattering of text, gives a compelling portrayal of Ophelia, who descends into madness with a face as despondent and vulnerable as an open wound.

Poor Guildenstern and Rosencrantz can’t fathom any of it but are decidedly funny in all their ignorance and forgetfulness.

“What’s he doing now?” Guildenstern demands of his friend looking at Hamlet.

“Talking to himself,” Rosencrantz replies with due diligence.

But their powers of deduction are gone, or were never there in the first place, and so they are left, as always, without memory of what to do or where they are headed.

Another distraction is the group of actors who come upon the absent-minded duo led by a man known only as the Player, played by Morgan Bondelid.

Stoppard gives the Player some of the best lines of the play including, “You don’t understand the humiliation of it — to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable — that somebody is watching! Don’t you see? We’re actors. We’re the opposite of people!”

Bondelid plays the role with a desultory air of contempt which works in portions but then never ventures beyond that single stratosphere to find the extreme highs and dramatic lows that might have revealed themselves more physically in The Player’s (and her) performance.

Meanwhile, the Player’s band of vaudevillian-like performers, the Tragedians, share no synchronicity, which is necessary to reach what could be a startling and powerful second-act tableau.

Director Katherine Woodzick seems to have left the Tragedians to their own devices, flailing and unsure in the first act, with no actions of purpose with which to save them from the self-conscious indicating this group of youthful actors resort to for lack of direction.

But thankfully these young actors wear masks in the second act, which somewhat frees them up and helps their final tableau, but never reaches the disturbing and climactic display Stoppard intended for the scene.

All in all, Woodzick does a fine job with the general movement of the play and with deciphering the text, especially where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are concerned, but never finds the play’s complete balance.

If she could find a way to more gracefully wrap the outlying elements of the Player and his Tragedians and the peripheral scenes of “Hamlet” in one cohesive coil around what is happening with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while they wait, Woodzick might have succeeded completely.

However, Woodzick should be applauded for her effectiveness on several levels for this undeniably difficult and tricky play.

Other collaborators who deserve a hand include Ann CW Deacon, who designed the set and the lights.

Deacon’s spare but evocative set lent itself to the language of the play. Garrulous and florid as it is, the text is given plenty of room to roam and breathe with the actors on this set. And several well-lit moments, such as a gorgeous infusion of a sphere of blue light on the boat at sea, is theatricality at its best.

Kudos should also go to Gretchen Cole for her elegant and on-the-mark 1960s costuming which made everyone in the cast look great.

Finally, Ian Marsanyi’s incidental music, composed expressly for this production for his South Whidbey High School senior project, was the highlight of the evening.

Performing the score live offstage on xylophone, percussion, synthesizer, piano and vocals were Marsanyi and his father, Robert Marsanyi.

Matching perfectly the mood of various scenes of the play, the exquisitely timed melodies and sound effects at times elegiac and at others playful, equaled the whorl of Stoppard’s script.

In the end it’s Guildenstern who says, “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said — no. But somehow we missed it.”

Perhaps a less courageous band of theater-makers would have said no to this ambitious play.

Although the production is not perfect, it’s always a gift to hear the words of the best playwrights; to judge for oneself why a play is known as one of the best of its genre.

Here’s your chance.

The show runs at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Saturday, Feb. 21. Call 221-8268 info.