‘Rope’ Gets a Taut Twist

It comes as no surprise that “Rope,” a 1929 play inspired by the infamous murder of a young male teenager by university students Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb, would have drawn the interest of Alfred Hitchcock. The filmmaker’s 1948 adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s work changed the setting, from London to New York, and several names, and fiddled with supporting characters, but the arc of the story and the sense of moral justice in its resolution remained intact.Now Gordon Greenberg has given Hamilton’s play another look and in his crackling new adaptation of “Rope,” being presented off-Broadway by The New Group, comeuppance is less of a sure thing. Better known as a director, Mr. Greenberg staged Classic Stage Company’s gorgeous off-Broadway revival of “The Baker’s Wife” last season and was involved in tweaking its story.Like Hitchcock’s “Rope,” Mr. Greenberg’s is set in a swank Manhattan apartment, but the neighborhood has shifted from the East Fifties to Turtle Bay, home to Stephen Sondheim and Katharine Hepburn for six and seven decades respectively, and it’s 1957, as that area was undergoing considerable gentrification. We first see the inhabitants, Garrett Stern and Nate Singer, graduate students at Princeton, as they’re frantically shifting furniture around in the dark. In the original play, these characters have different names, and it’s implied that they’re lovers — a point that predictably became even more subtextual for their counterparts in the movie, despite the involvement of a gay screenwriter, Arthur Laurents. Mr. Greenberg and director Scott Elliott, in contrast, make it clear from the start that Garrett and Nate are in a homosexual relationship, and an especially steamy scene down the line pairs one of them with another male character.The central figures in the new “Rope” are also outsiders in another respect: Like Leopold and Loeb, they are Jews, though they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds. In one of the clever, third-person asides that Mr. Greenberg has provided all the characters, Garrett describes himself as handsome and athletic but adds, “He wants to be mistaken for the son of assimilated German Jews, not the shtetl Jews …from whom he actually descends. Garrett has spent his life becoming the person he thinks belongs in the room.”The less physically robust, more patently neurotic Nate is a son of privilege, whose hugely successful father has provided him with these swell digs and is presumably funding the young couple’s lifestyle. “If you squint, he can almost pass for gentile, a point of pride for his highly aspirational mother,” Nate tells us of himself, adding that he “has been taught that fitting in is a form of safety.”Garrett and Nate have both, in other words, internalized the primacy of assimilation and aspiration, adding a fascinating layer to this “Rope” which, like previous incarnations, unfolds at a party they throw after committing a ghastly crime, with evidence hidden under the guests’ noses. Having committed what they see as the perfect murder, the young men want to revel in the superior intelligence they trust will enable them to avoid not only felony charges but, perhaps worse from their perspectives, shame.It turns out that Garrett in particular is an avid follower of Nietzsche, who got brief nods in the original play and film. In Mr. Greenberg’s version, the student — plainly the alpha male to Nate’s beta male, and played by Cameron Monaghan with a chilling combination of slickness and brutish intensity — is seen reading “Beyond Good and Evil” and later cites the German philosopher a few times, at one point noting, “Nietzsche says the noble man doesn’t accept the order he’s born into.”In one of several flashbacks that add context and enhance the play’s suspense, a professor named Rupert, another key character (James Stewart played his equivalent on screen), tries to challenge Garrett’s interpretation of this and other theories. Stage and screen veteran Jason Butler Harner vividly conveys this Rupert’s own intellectual arrogance, along with a louche quality that becomes more pronounced as the academic, like his hosts and others at the party, drinks to excess.The booze exacerbates Nate’s growing paranoia, which seems rational in this case and is deftly captured by Corey Fogelmanis, whose delicate good looks also lend credibility to the part. Elizabeth Gillies, Graham Phillips, and James Waterston complete the excellent cast, each playing a member of Garrett and Nate’s elite circle; Mr. Waterston adds poignance as their victim’s unsuspecting father. Mr. Elliott, The New Group’s founding artistic director, keeps the action taut right up to the final twists that make this “Rope” a pulsing thriller on its own terms. “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out,” Hitchcock once proposed. You won’t find any leftover pieces here.

‘Rope’ Gets a Taut Twist

‘Rope’ Gets a Taut Twist

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