We would like to invite you to a dinner party.

Your hosts are two charming young men with a refined taste for music, literature, and homicide. Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan indulge themselves in the ultimate Nietzschean fantasy by strangling the life out of a former classmate whom they take to be an inferior being. To make their work of art a masterpiece, they invite the victim’s family and friends over to unwittingly dine off the dead man’s coffin.

Rope explores the sense of horror that can linger just under the surface of ordinary life. Taking inspiration from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the anticipation of a disturbing realization maximizes the play’s suspense. As the evening draws on, the audience finds themselves complicit with the two charming murderers. Rope was remarkable in its day, partly for the haunting questions it asks about human nature and partly for its interest in homosexuality during a time of homophobic censorship. We hope that our version of Rope will leave you hanging on the edge of your seat.