For more than 30 years, Scott Elliott, the founding artistic director of The New Group, has staged or produced plenty of plays in which the characters are naked, in varying degrees of undress, and/or engaged in carnal doings. It might be expected that Elliott knows how to make the sensational best of the queer psychosexual tensions twisting through Rope.
Guess again.
Opening Tuesday, The New Group offers the premiere of Gordon Greenberg’s adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s thriller. Best known as an Alfred Hitchcock film, Rope originated in 1929 as a play first seen in London and then New York, where it was titled Rope’s End at the John Golden Theatre. The editor of “Best Plays” for that season noted the show “stirred the emotions of the morbid.” The plot involved English people attending a macabre cocktail party held in a Mayfair flat. Reworked for Hitchcock, Arthur Laurents’ screenplay moved the party to an apartment in 1948 Manhattan and more or less Americanized its characters.
Rope is the yarn that begins as two university undergraduates murder an acquaintance just for kicks. Making it even kinkier, the strangled corpse is concealed inside an elegant chest used for drinks and canapes during a little soiree whose guest list includes the dead guy’s dad. Giving this thriller its reputation for lavender decadence is the sexual bond between the alpha partner, named Garrett here, and Nate, his beta boyfriend. The couple’s ties only could be insinuated in the earlier incarnations when queer existence still was hidden in the closet (and “queer” was used as a pejorative). Greenberg’s adaptation, placed in 1957 New York City, makes their fraught affair pretty obvious from the start.
Unlike the Hitchcock flick, which begins with a scream, this 90-minute play saves the big shocks for its conclusion. Greenberg’s melodrama can be noted in further detail: How the characters describe themselves directly to the audience. How (perhaps influenced by the real-life Leopold & Loeb case that sparked Hamilton’s original) an ugly streak of Jewish self-hate motivates action. How flashbacks reveal the first meetings of Garrett and Nate at dear old Princeton, and so on, but there’s little point in relating more because ultimately as a drama, Rope is junk. Or more charitably, candy. Whichever, Rope is about nothing more than its warped little story.
No worries, everybody likes candy. Still, why a fairly daring arts organization like The New Group presents such trivial entertainment is questionable. Possibly the play is produced to be a potentially lucrative box office attraction in a period when the company is raising funds to renovate its recently acquired Theater at St. Clement’s, where Rope currently is being performed under Elliott’s direction.
As noted, Elliott is a longtime expert at conjuring up louche atmospherics and fevered performances for plays driven by sexual undercurrents. From the very start, as Garrett and Nate — clad only in white underwear — silently roll out rugs and move furniture to assemble the living room setting while shards of Bernard Herrmann’s “Psycho” music shrieks away, it is obvious Elliott aims for a stylized interpretation. Jeff Croiter’s lighting design shrouds the undefined edges of Derek McLane’s setting in gloom and at times grows murky enough to obscure the actors’ faces. Cigarette smoke casts a nasty-smelling haze over the story’s murders most foul.
Disappointingly, the tension among the story’s several cat-and-mouse games never grows sufficiently taut to grip one’s attention. In my experience, some among the company’s previous shows looked under-rehearsed, so perhaps Rope simply wasn’t ready for a press preview.
The line between stylization and a cartoon is thin, and it was frequently crossed the other evening by the leads, particularly by Corey Fogelmanis, whose hollow-cheeked Nate mostly was quivering, squeaking prey for stronger forces. Most critically, the thriller’s weird, should-be sexy triangle formed by the pathetic Nate, Cameron Monaghan’s snide, sinister Garrett, and Rupert, their formidable university professor, played by Jason Butler Harner in an ascot and an enigmatic manner, generated little sizzle. Passing moments of diversion are provided by Graham Phillips as a jocular, overdressed guest — Catherine Zuber designed the 1950s duds — and especially Elizabeth Gillies as a chic, sharp-eyed undergrad from Sarah Lawrence who favors the room with a snatch of “Moonlight in Vermont.”
Rope opened November 3, 2026, at the Theater at St. Clement’s and runs through December 6. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
