Classic Stage Company to Resent RUR and ROPE as Final Rediscovery Readings

Classic Stage Company has revealed the final two Rediscovery Readings of the 2025-2026 season. On Monday, March 2nd at 7pm, CSC will present RUR by Karel Čapek, adapted by Talene Monahon, and directed by Jess Chayes. On Monday, March 9th at 7pm, CSC will present ROPE, adapted by Gordon Greenberg from the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton, directed by Greenberg. Both readings will take place at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater (136 East 13th St).

Tickets for these one-night-only readings are $20 and on sale now. CSC FlexPass holders are able to attend all Rediscovery Readings free of charge.  Casting information for the readings will be announced at a later date.

ABOUT RUR

Step into the world of Rossum’s Universal Robots, where a would-be humanitarian finds herself entangled in an enterprise that is mass producing biologically engineered humanoid workers. From Karel Čapek’s seminal and eerily prescient 1920 play R.U.R, this adaptation by Talene Monahon (Meet the Cartozians) continues Čapek’s interrogation of the precarity of automation and the role of human responsibility in our age of Artificial Intelligence. This adaptation of RUR was commissioned by Shakespeare Center LA (Ben Donenberg, Artistic Director).

ABOUT ROPE

Based on the true crime story of queer murderers Leopold and Loeb, this brand-new adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s stage play Rope, which became the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name, resets the action to 1957 Manhattan, where Garrett Stern and Nate Singer are beautiful, brilliant, and dangerously bored Princeton grad students, throwing a dinner party in their chic Turtle Bay apartment – on top of a trunk containing their murder victim. A murder mystery in reverse, the story becomes a game of cat and mouse between the seductive, arrogant Garrett and his dinner party guests, as they get closer to discovering the truth - while his lover (and accomplice), the anxiety-prone Nathan, begins to crack under pressure. Newly adapted by Gordon Greenberg (The Baker’s Wife), this Rope is a raucous, bloody, sharp witted, sexually charged thriller that speaks to today’s cultural reckoning with privilege and power. 

Gordon Greenberg (Playwright, Director). Broadway: Heart of Rock and Roll (James Earl Jones), Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn (also co-writer, Studio 54, PBS Great Performances); Off-Broadway: The Baker’s Wife (CSC), Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors (also co-writer), Working (Drama Desk), Jacques Brel… (Drama Desk, Drama League, Outer Critics noms); London: Guys and Dolls with Rebel Wilson (Olivier Award nom), Single White Female (A.T.G.), Barnum, The Baker’s Wife, Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors (all @ Menier Chocolate Factory); Regional: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf  (Geffen, L. A. Drama Critics Award), Piaf/Dietrich (Mirvish Toronto, Dora Award), Crime and Punishment, A Comedy (also co-writer, Old Globe), Tangled (Disney), Ghost Tour (writer, Theatre Aspen), Stephan Zweig’s 24 Hours… (adapting/directing for Reichenau Festival, Austria) and regional work at Williamstown, Old Globe, Signature, Paper Mill, Huntington, Chicago Shakespeare, MUNY, Goodspeed. Television: “Most Talkative” (NBC, Co-Executive Producer/Writer with Blumhouse , Andy Cohen) and original movie musicals for Disney and Nickelodeon. Education: Stanford University, NYU Film School. He is an Ars Nova O.G. and Artistic Director of the Broadway Teachers Workshop.