Cohabitating young Londoners strangle a university classmate to death, hide the body in a living room trunk, then welcome the victim’s father, his aunt, a pair of fellow students, and the teacher whose beliefs inspired their cold-blooded act for a dinner soiree in Patrick Hamilton’s Rope, easily the darkest. deadliest, and most daring offering in Actors Co-op’s 27-year history.

Even those familiar with Alfred Hitchcock’s Americanized 1948 film adaptation will find themselves gasping in shock and horror at the violence perpetrated on Ronald Kentley for “for the sake of danger and for the sake of killing,” or so Ronald’s fellow underclassman Wyndham Brandon (Burt Grinstead) puts it to his “roommate” Charles “Granno” Granillo (David Huynh) as the elated killers await their guests, Brandon declaring himself more “truly and wonderfully alive” than he has felt in his twenty-some years.

 Though older audience members might not grasp that Brandon and Granno are more than mere roomies, those familiar with the Leopold-Loeb case that inspired Hamilton’s 1929 play will see that Actors Co-op has rather stealthy programmed its first production with a pair of gay lead characters, just one of multiple risks the Christian theater company is taking with Rope, not the least of which is asking an audience to be torn between wanting a couple of killers to get caught and hoping they might just get away with murder.

Neither possibility is anywhere near a given, since who in their right mind would suspect that the dinner laid out atop a tablecloth-covered trunk this dark and stormy night contains a corpse?

 Certainly not Ronald’s doddering father Sir Johnstone Kentley (Carl Johnson) or his dotty aunt Mrs. Debenham (Elizabeth Herron) or their classmates, the foppish Kenneth Raglan (Kyle Anderson) and the flighty Leila Arden (Heidi Palomino), or French maid Sabot (Deborah Marlowe), or even the killers’ one-time prof Rupert Cadell (Donnie Smith), whose Nietzscheism inspired their crime.

Over the course of Rope’s breakneck, intermissionless ninety minutes, however, the young couple’s hope of getting off scot-free proves far from a sure thing.

 To begin with, there’s Granno’s suggestion that there may have been someone just up the street when Ronald and he arrived at the apartment by car. Then there’s Leila’s facetious remark that the padlocked chest might be filled with rotting bones. There’s also the matter of Ronald’s theater ticket, found on the floor post murder and given to Granno by Brandon for safe (or not so safe) keeping.

Needless to say, if ever there were a play to keep you on the edge of your seat, it’s Rope, particularly since Actors Co-op has entrusted their season opener to director Ken Sawyer, whose Deathtrap scared the dickens out of Angelinos a few years back.

Staging the first ten minutes or so in virtual blackness, the killers’ faces illuminated only by candlelight (terrific work by lighting designer Matt Richter) punctuated by the victim’s screams and hysterical homicidal bursts of laughter that make Hitchcock’s take on the killing positively dull by comparison.

As he did in Deathtrap, Sawyer improves on the Hamilton’s script without changing a word of the text, first by suggesting that Mrs. Debenham might have psychic powers, and later by turning a call for help into an act of conscience and expiation.

 Anderson, Herron, Johnson, Marlowe, and Palomino deliver pitch-perfect featured turns to support a trio of sensational leads—Grinstead’s loose cannon of a Brandon getting steadily bolder and more unhinged, Huynh’s submissive Granno unraveling before our very eyes, and Smith’s effete Rupert suggesting his own capacity for conceiving of, if not executing, evil.

 Adam R. Macias ups the thrills with a spectacularly pulse-pounding sound design, Hellen Harwell’s elegant in-the-round set makes us all voyeurs-on-the-wall, Paula Higgins’s costumes are 1920s gems, and Harwell scores top marks for period props save an anachronistic coiled phone cord.

Rope is produced by Kevin Shewey. Lydia Soto is stage manager. Julia Aks and Isaac W. Jay are understudies.

Following last year’s play-it-safe season, Actors Co-op is back to the kind of risk-taking it did with Cat’s Paw, 33 Variations, and Summer And Smoke. Rope is easily the riskiest bet of all, but one that pays off big time. It’s one walloping doozy of a thriller.

Actors Co-op, 1760 N. Gower St., Hollywood.
www.actorsco-op.org

–Steven Stanley
September 30, 2018
Photos: Larry Sandez

Tags: Actors Co-op, Los Angeles Theater Review, Patrick Hamilton