Two short, sweet, and typically surreal plays by Tom Stoppard, originally produced in 1976 for Inter-Action, a theatre collective founded by Ed Berman. "New-Found-Land", a paean to Berman's birth country of the U.S., opens as a two-hander about civil servants deciding on the naturalization of an American as a British citizen and suddenly swerves off-road to become a travelogue visiting every American cultural cliche and celebrating it in demented, rhapsodic joy. The two hands are Richard Goolden and Stephen Moore, both voices you'll know if you consumed the original "Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" radio series from the late 1970s. Side two is an adaptation of "Hamlet" for Inter-Action's own Dogg's Troupe, wherein the Bard's masterwork is reduced to thirteen minutes, and then two minutes. (America's Reduced Shakespeare Company ran with this idea in their first 25-minute rendition of "Hamlet" in 1981, and then took it to its logical conclusion; in the live show I saw, the evening ended with "Hamlet" reduced to one second.)
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