Review by Ron Fassler . . .
Opening tonight, Rope is the inaugural production at the New Group’s new home, the Theatre at St. Clement’s on W. 46th Street. Billed in its advertisements as a “glamorous, queer-forward psychological thriller,” it is a reworking by Gordon Greenberg of Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 melodrama, which was retitled Rope’s End for Broadway. When it was first produced, societal suppression still reigned and a playwright like Hamilton had to address forbidden subjects cleverly, often peppering dialogue with extra added doses of subtle wit to get their points across. Today with none of those machinations in place, it’s important to be reminded that those once enforced restrictions often led to employing masterful techniques. One such expert was director Alfred Hitchcock, who was always sneaking sexual innuendo past the censors. Coincidentally, Hitchcock filmed his own version of Hamilton’s play with Rope (1948), in which anxieties seethed beneath the surface. Now nearly eighty years later, the New Group artistic director Scott Elliot has disappointingly directed this Rope with a heavy hand, tying things into something of a Gordian knot.
Rope is based on the infamous 1924 case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two young men (nineteen and eighteen) who killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks simply for the thrill of it. Both were highly intelligent, well-educated, and from good families, and they were reportedly driven by a distorted reading of Nietzsche’s Übermensch: the mistaken belief that committing a “perfect crime” would prove their superiority and show that they answered to no god, giving their lives special meaning.
Cameron Monaghan; foreground: Corey Fogelmanis.
Leopold and Loeb were lovers, and their homosexuality was used to brand them as “perverts” and was cited as the chief motive for their crime. Setting the action in 1958, Greenberg also changes things for his fictional counterparts Garret Stern (Cameron Monaghan) and Cory Fogelmanis (Nate Singer) so that the pair no longer kill for fun but out of fear after their victim discovers evidence that they are lovers. This alters everything and eliminates the far more interesting inner lives of two young men overintellectualizing their misguided furies at a system from which they felt alienated. And by dropping all euphemistic rhetoric, Greenberg is free to show Stern and Fogelmanis blatantly revel in their attraction to one another, leaving little mystery to this mystery. Any surprises, if you can call them that, are telegraphed from a mile away.
Even before a line of dialogue is spoken, there is a choreographed pantomime of the men, post-killing, putting a room back together. Hubristically, Greenberg and Elliott have Bernard Herrmann’s theme from Psycho playing. Not only does it conjure, for those in the know, the specter of Hitchcock’s Rope, but by blaring music from another of Hitchcock’s films (and perhaps his most terrifying masterpiece), it invites comparisons the production can’t hope to survive.
As for the actors, we don’t get much more than one shade from each performer: Cameron Monaghan (psychotic), Nate Singer (neurotic), Graham Phillips (doofus), Jason Butler Harnar (smarmy), and James Waterston (drab). Only Elizabeth Gillies, the sole female in the cast, imbues her performance with an array of colorful attributes. It’s a pleasure whenever she’s onstage.
Derek McLane’s set design is handsome and practical, and Catherine Zuber’s costumes serve the production well (particularly Gillies’s red and black outfit). Jeff Croiter’s lighting is beautiful, especially in shifting moods and tensions during the multiple flashback sequences.
The thriller is a genre that has gone out of fashion, and every effort to bring it back should be welcome. But my frustrations with this production are best summed up by saying, “Skip Rope.”
At the Theatre at St. Clements, 423 W 26th Street, NYC. For ticket information, please visit Rope.
Photos by Monique Carboni.
Headline photo: Cameron Monaghan and Corey Fogelmanis.
