‘The Verge’ and ‘Rope’: Sex, crime and Freud in New York

By Grace Kim

Susan Glaspell’s 1921 play The Verge is being revived by Fiasco Theater at the Public Theater under Jessie Austrian’s direction, while the New Group is attempting a new version of Rope.

In her Critic’s Notebook for The Times, chief theater critic Helen Shaw links the two New York engagements to the Freudian revolution of the 1920s. She sees both descending from the polite society of the intelligentsia toward primal urges, and calls the subconscious “each drama’s silent extra character.”

Shaw starts with a “subversive, queer motif” returning to contemporary culture. Lovers taunt one another through criminal transgression or dominance games with lethal outcomes. Murder becomes part of the erotic menu, where a victim’s death adds “a frisson of meaning” to erotic play.

The motif often carries a deliberate retro charge, which Shaw uses to broaden the pattern beyond sex or crime. Her examples make that retro quality concrete:

• Jane Schoenbrun: In the ’80s-esque horror-burlesque Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder end up blood-smeared.
• Revivals: Shaw points to recent revivals of The Rocky Horror Show and Jean Genet’s 1947 “when girls attack” shocker, The Maids.
• Patricia Highsmith: The author “is back, too,” Shaw notes. Her often queer-coded Tom Ripley has most recently been played by the “liquidly seductive Andrew Scott,” a killer who “sort of invades his victims, ontologically speaking.”

What does the Freudian connection change for audiences?

Shaw’s answer is that the connection changes the object of attention. The plays are not simply about sex or crime; they expose how the unconscious joins desire, social transgression and death.

Shaw calls The Verge an “odd hybrid”: a “liberatory feminist domestic comedy” grafted onto a “psychosexual tragedy” (a crisis driven by sexual and unconscious conflict). The form matters because domestic conflict and psychosexual catastrophe operate as one design, not separate comic and tragic modes.

In Austrian’s production, The Verge frequently describes characters as “queer.” Shaw notes that in 1921 the word mostly meant “strange,” while allowing that Glaspell may not have overtly or consciously referred to same-sex relationships. Yet the play depicts straight sexuality as explicitly deranging.

In Shaw’s account, Miriam Silverman plays Claire Archer, a freethinking married botanist with a string of male beaus. She breeds a new plant species that can be “alive in its otherness,” while Claire’s husband, played by Noah Brody, and their “vapid” but “wonderfully funny” daughter, played by Amara Leonard, try to make her normal.

Claire’s husband begs her friends and secret suitors: “Don’t encourage her to be queer.” He hopes she will conform. Shaw identifies the mechanism plainly: any pressure, even an embrace, drives Claire to madness. The line turns social containment into something that sounds like intimacy, while the play exposes its coercive cost.

For theater audiences, the practical change in watching Rope beside The Verge is interpretive: follow desire as it collides with social demands, and danger as the mechanism that makes the collision forceful. Shaw’s pairing makes the Freudian question more urgent than a revival of period style. The Verge carries the sharper contemporary charge because its pressure to erase “queer” otherness lands in the present, not only in 1921.