Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story was one of 21 performance acts that ran as part of the WaterTower Theater's 15th Out of the Loop Fringe Festival. It depicts the story of the 1924 "crime of the century," the brutal murder of teenager Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two brilliant young men from wealthy families in Chicago.
The "set" consists of a chair, two black cubes, and a piano on an otherwise bare stage. The play opens with some interminable cacophonous music which continued throughout the entire play. It’s 1958, and an adult Leopold (Kyle R. Trentham) sits in a chair facing an imaginary parole board -- a disembodied, and mostly unintelligible voice emanating from the rear of the house. Despite his few opening lines Trenthan stumbles over them. His later performance proves adequate but lackluster.
The two protagonists, 19-year-old Nathan Leopold (Austin Ray Beck) and 18-year-old Richard Loeb (Joshua Sherman) give excellent and believable portrayals throughout the play. Leopold is characterized as being subservient and needy and Loeb as being imperious and above it all.
We learn that the two men were lovers with Leopold in awe of Loeb's intellect. Loeb had graduated the University of Michigan at 17. Leopold, no dummy, had graduated as a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago at age 18. He was consumed by Nietzsche's theories of a superman who need not follow the rules of society. He was convinced that Loeb was one of those supermen. The two had already committed petty crimes and arson and decided that since they were supermen, they could commit the perfect crime, murder, and not get caught. Their story, in reality, was a fascinating case study, but Thrill Me, by playwright Stephen Dolginoff, who also wrote the dissonant score, is rife with historical inaccuracies. To name but a few: the play gives the age of the victim as 12; Bobby Franks was actually 14. The play recounts how Leopold and Loeb drove to the private school attended by Franks and waited for the next person who walked out as their victim and offered him a ride home, asking him his address, allegedly so they would know where to send the ransom note. In reality Leopold and Loeb and Franks were neighbors and were acquainted with each other, and Franks occasionally played tennis at the Loeb home. The play also contains dialogue in which the perpetrators lured Franks into their car by tempting him with a ride in their snazzy car to impress his friends. In actuality they asked him to help them with something to do with a tennis racket.
Although the dialogue throughout suggests, and history implies, Leopold and Loeb were lovers, the graphic portrayal of onstage sex between the two is gratuitous and unnecessary and does nothing to further the plot. Fortunately for these two cold-blooded murderers, they had wealthy parents who employed the services of renowned attorney, Clarence Darrow, whose brilliant strategy saved them from being executed. Thrill Me gives short shrift to this fact, giving it only a brief mention.
The play ends with Leopold, after five attempts, being paroled and told he was now a free man. That's it - end of play. Although we do learn that Loeb was killed in prison by a fellow inmate, a more accomplished playwright would have included a brief epilogue telling the audience what happened to Leopold after his parole. History tells us that, to avoid the limelight caused by Meyer Levin's 1956 novel, “Compulsion” (based on the Leopold and Loeb case), Levin’s 1957 play, and ultimately the 1959 film starring Orson Welles, Leopold moved to Puerto Rico, married, and lived out an obscure life working in hospitals and church missions until his death in 1971.
