Tape

A salient look at the dynamics of rape versus consentual relationships
by Anne-Margret Bellavoine, Northern Lights

Recent headlines make Stephen Belber's critically acclaimed drama Tape the more thought provoking, but with a twist. It generally is women who accuse men, who then defend themselves on various grounds.

Set in room 32 of a seedy motel chain in Lansing, Michigan, the play reunites three high school friends and lovers, Casey Long as Vincent, Dimas Diaz as Jon and Stephanie Philo as Amy.

Vince continues to get high ten years after high school, while nerdy Jon has moved on to a promising future as a film writer, and Amy has become no less than Assistant District Attorney.

Vince is there to attend the premiere, but has his own agenda for this reunion. Amy had been his girlfriend, but, to his chagrin, Jon slept with her after they broke up, an action he still cannot forget or forgive.

As Vince downs an impressive number of cans of beers before moving on to recreational drugs, he and Jon revisit their teenage days, and what did or did not happen between Amy and them.

Vince has just broken up with his latest girlfriend, due to 'unresolved violence tendencies'. The two men hurl insults at each other, while Jon cloaks himself in a veil of political correctedness which Vince just as surely and assuredly deconstructs.

Just as our former President kept the country on tenterhooks with his nuanced interpretation of what 'it' constituted in his relationship with a voluptuous intern, Jon reluctantly admits to 'applying excessive linguistic pressure' in coercing Amy into unwanted intercourse. Rape can be in the eye of the beholder.

From verbal assault, the two men move on to real fighting, until the ice queen makes her entrance. She is puzzled by both men's behavior and unsure of what Vince is trying to prove. Whatever it is that is being brought up, she sides with Jon in finding it irrelevant to her present status.

A couple of clever twists turn the tables more than once in this taut one act piece.

The constant message is that our perceptions of any one event are never other people's who experienced it also. Among the many questions raised is whether blackmail for a higher moral ground is ever justifiable.

Jeremy Golden's set brings this well known motel chain's unmis¬takably bland furnishing style to life, complete with a neon sign to the far side.

Long's crass antics are eminently fun to watch as he weaves his traps for Diaz, caught like a helpless deer in the headlights, while Philo remains above the two men in her carefully composed role as a successful career woman who has tucked her senior year mistakes well away in her past.

Director Oanh Nguyen received a standing ovation for this superb work which manages to blend comic entertainment into a stunning social commentary.

Take a Chance
See a good play - like Tape - for chrissakes
by Joel Beers, O.C. Weekly

Vincent is a coke-sniffing pot dealer whose latent "violent tendencies" have driven away those closest to him. Jon is a buttoned-down, anal-retentive filmmaker determined to use his art to show the world the cliff that society is headed over if things don’t radically change. They were best friends in high school, but 10 years and different journeys have fundamentally changed their relationship. Think Michael Moore vs. a more jaded "The Dude" Lebowski. Think Radisson vs. Motel 6.

They’re meeting in Lansing, Michigan, ostensibly to celebrate the biggest weekend of Jon’s life: the entry into a festival of the film he’s spent most of his post-high-school life creating. But the burned-out Vincent has his own agenda: he’s going to get the truth about what happened between Jon and Amy, Vincent’s high-school love turned assistant district attorney.

That’s the setup for Stephen Belber’s compactly written 1999 drama Tape, which is receiving an intensely compelling production courtesy of director Oanh Nguyen and the Chance Theater. The contemporary nature of the play, its rather seedy subject matter—drugs! Date rape! Motel 6!—and the quality of the production (helped by Nguyen’s firm blend of naturalism and stylized lighting and movement effects) all point to a further maturation of this company. For the past few years, the Chance has proven the county’s most active storefront theater in terms of number and type of shows; plays like this suggest they’re also interested in saying something.

So what does Tape say? Pretty much what every good play says in some way or another: people are fucked-up, we’re liars, we’re scared, we live in denial, and we are the worst judges of our own characters. But the seeds for redemption are buried in there somewhere, and the first step toward cleaning the moral slate is honestly embracing that most daunting of all F words: forgiveness.

The fact that revelation is embodied in the rather selfish, arrogant nature of Vincent (a thoroughly believable and watchable Casey Long) is one of the masterstrokes of Belber’s play. His hunger to find out what happened between Jon (a suitably reserved Dimas Diaz) and his ex-girlfriend Amy (a subtly dangerous Stephanie Philo) a decade ago is obviously a psychological defense keeping him from fully facing the total loser he’s dangerously close to becoming. His obsessive need to explain the past is his desperate way of burying the present because he’s scared shitless about an empty future. And ain’t that America for you and me?

You take a look around the county’s theater scene, and like always, there’s a bunch of mediocre to just-plain-lame stuff being produced. But shows such as the Chance’s Tape, along with the Hunger Artists’ stellar production of the absolutely killer The Gog/Magog Project (closing this weekend) are living proof that amid the Rents and The Producerses, good, honest theater that is more concerned with emotion and soul than hyperbole and image isn’t just a peripheral diversion—it’s a fucking necessity.

Tape at the Chance Theater, 5552 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills, (714) 777-3033. Sat., 4 p.m.; Sun., 6 p.m. Through Oct. 17. $15-$17.

Tape lifts veil from pivotal moment.
Stephen Belber's tight 1999 drama dissects the moral integrity of a decade-old event.
by Eric Marchese, Special to the Register

How much damage can a 15-second tape recording do? Quite a bit, if that tape contains a statement of confession to a shameful past action.

In his 1999 drama "Tape," Stephen Belber embeds that concept in the premise of two former high school buddies, Jon and Vince, who meet up 10 years after graduation. Eventually, the conversation turns to Amy, the girl each of them dated. It's upon the interrelationships of these three characters that "Tape" turns, raising questions about the moral choices people make and the commonly accepted, almost casual violation of women in society.

In the Chance Theater's staging, directed by Oanh Nguyen, an uninterrupted, often-riveting turn of events begins innocently enough. We're in Vince's room at a lowly Motel 6 in Lansing, Mich. To the pulsing beat of techno music, Vince awaits Jon's arrival by going through a laugh-inducing orgy of guzzling beer, belching and distributing the crumpled beer cans around the room.

The air is charged almost immediately when we recognize the personality clash that has always simmered beneath Vince and Jon's friendship. Vince (Casey Long) is an easygoing frat-boy type who makes a living dealing drugs and who, Jon asserts, presents "a threatening appearance." Jon, played by Dimas Diaz, is a slender, bespectacled independent filmmaker who wears his sensitivity on his sleeve and hopes to improve the world through his art.

The elephant in the room is the unresolved set of issues surrounding Vince's break-up with Amy, his high school sweetheart. At a graduation-night party, Amy wound up in a locked bedroom with Jon - but in "Rashomon" fashion, each character has a different perspective on what really happened that night.

While the tension grows increasingly taut in Nguyen's skilled staging, the Chance production doesn't really get rolling until Amy (Stephanie Philo), now an assistant district attorney in Lansing, arrives at Vince's room. Prepared to go to dinner with Vince, she's instead confronted with the sight of both men and reminded of their past. Her reactions to what we perceive as a date rape aren't what we expect - and just to keep us from getting too smug in our assumptions, neither Jon nor Vince is, at his core, what he appears to be.

Vince is referred to as a "swarthy Italian-American," an inaccurate description of Long, who otherwise possesses the man's crude, deliberately grungy exterior, vitality and ferocity. Long certainly doesn't give off the electric air of danger you'd like to see in Vince, but his performance is in vivid counterpoint to the more civilized postures of Dimas' Jon and Philo's Amy.

With his thin frame, glasses, anemic look, tentative manner and precise way of speaking, Dimas creates an especially over-refined Jon. Emphasizing the character's desire to come off as the chic artiste, costume designer Alisa Haase clothes Dimas in solid black.

Philo shows that Amy has matured and changed more than her former boyfriends. Her portrayal is of a stylish young woman who's feminine yet logical, hardheaded and not easily rattled. In the climactic scene, Philo displays a quivering emotionality that, if missing, would make Amy a one-note character. The actress keeps the dichotomy alive by enlivening Amy's strait-laced personality with a crooked yet winning smile.

Jeremy Golden's set design captures the mind-numbing sameness of motel life, and his lighting and Bryan Barton's sound scheme help supercharge a script boosted by self-assured performances and direction.