*Rope,* Oct 23 2026
I saw Rope at The New Group on Oct 23, 2026.
I'm a big fan of the 1948 Hitchcock film based on the play and was very excited to see the play on which it was based. I dug into the production a little after buying my ticket and saw that it was a new adaptation by Gordon Greenberg of the 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton. I had a feeling we were in trouble and I was right.
The play is a loose fictionalized version of the Leopold and Loeb case in 1924. They were two students at the University of Chicago who decided to commit "the perfect murder," for which they would never be caught. They did it for the thrill of taking someone's life, and getting away with it, and to prove their superior intellect. Of course they were sloppy, they were caught, and their trial became The Trial of the Century (until OJ drove along in his white Bronco).
Leopold and Loeb were a couple and the great thing about the play and the movie is that the gay content is submerged, unspoken, but has a powerful presence by its absence. I suspected that the new playwright would go whole hog with the gay business and I was right. Which solution shows more respect to the gay characters: the 1929 version, in which the couple is terse and tightly controlled and the gay content is only hinted at - - or the 2026 version in which the gay characters are all over each other but also smarmy and a dastardly collection of loose cannons? You might guess that I prefer the original version. It also would have been fascinating, from a cultural perspective, to see the original, to see how buttoned up things had to be back then.
Greenberg also completely changed the ending, made it totally unhinged and dopey. I was glad I only paid $65 for it (that's cheap in this town), that it was only 90 minutes long, and it had a 7pm curtain. I was home in bed by 9:20pm.
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