Video: Gordon Greenberg Unravels the Dark Secrets of ROPE

Gordon Greenberg is putting a provocative new twist on a classic thriller. His adaptation of Rope, directed by Scott Elliott, is now playing at The Theatre at St. Clement’s through December 6. BroadwayWorld’s Richard Ridge caught up with the playwright to discuss the inspiration behind his reimagining of the story, its darker themes, and bringing the production to life with The New Group.

Inspired by the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case, Rope follows two Princeton graduate students who host a dinner party with a chilling secret: the body of a classmate they’ve murdered is hidden inside a trunk in the room.

“I’ve always been curious about what would happen if we excavated kind of the subtext and the true story of Leopold and Loeb,” Greenberg explained. “This whole thing is based on a true crime murder that happened in the 1920s, and they were affluent, sort of privileged young guys who seemingly had everything going for them, but behind the curtain, there was a lot of trauma and discontent and that’s what I wanted to pull out and play with. So rather than this just being an old school suspense thriller, it’s multi-pronged. It’s an exploration of who they are. It’s a comedy. It’s also a thriller. It’s a lot of things.”

For Greenberg, the story is about much more than the pursuit of the perfect crime. His adaptation digs deeper into the characters’ relationships, desires, and desperate need for connection.

“But you and I know that behind history, and behind theories, there are beating hearts and bodies and desires,” he continued. “And that’s really what this is about, is people all really wanting to be loved, wanting to be wanted, as someone once said. And you see a lot of the characters are quite sad in their deficit of love and affection and are going to great lengths to secure that.”

Greenberg also opened up about collaborating with Elliott, whose fearless approach encouraged him to push the material even further.

“The fact that he wanted to direct it was both practically speaking wonderful and artistically speaking an honor and a joy because I knew that he would bring his sensibility,” he said. “He has certainly a more sexually explicit leaning than I do normally and I loved that he pulled me in that direction and encouraged me to dig deeper and go further with all of the sort of instincts that I was having with the material, both in terms of social class, in terms of their actual relationships, and the behavior that might be happening in the dark, in the shadows where no one looks.”