REVIEWS ...
Tuesday, November 21, 2000
Searing play 'Tape' opens GableStage season
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Life is full of ambiguities.
Is he telling the truth? Is she saying what she really means? Are there absolutes in the interpretation of an event that two people have tried to repress?
So much of drama, film and television ties up a story with neat, incontrovertible bows.
Playwright Stephen Belber leads us down a more ambiguous and far more intriguing path in Tape, a searingly intense 80-minute play that is kicking off the GableStage season with the billowing emotional fire of a space launch.
Belber's play, one of the hits of last spring's prestigious Humana Festival, has already been made into an as-yet-unreleased film starring Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard. But do not skip director Joseph Adler's beautifully observed, infinitely detailed interpretation of Belber's unsettling tale.
Initially, Tape seems to be not much more than an amusing if fractious reunion of high school buddies who've grown way apart.
Jon (Christopher Carlisle) is an aspiring filmmaker whose movie is being screened at a so-so film festival in Michigan. His onetime bud Vince (Paul Tei) has dual "careers" as a volunteer firefighter and dedicated drug dealer.
Vince has traveled from home in California to a cost-effective Motel 6 in Lansing, summoning Jon for a reconnect in his room before they go out to dinner.
But Vince has no intention of dining. Instead, he chugs Schlitz beer, smokes a joint, does a line of cocaine (licking every last crystal from a credit card) as he and Jon trade verbal jabs about grievances fresh and ancient.
Then Vince gets down to his real business: Getting Jon to admit that he date-raped the virginal Amy (Michelle Riu) after she dumped Vince near the end of their senior year.
Darkly funny, deliberately foul and absolutely engrossing, Belber's play contains surprising twists that a critic dare not reveal.
See it for yourself and savor another dazzling performance by Tei, who recently won the Carbonell Award for his turn as the platinum-haired killer in last season's Popcorn. Carlisle is at first too stiff as the uptight Jon, but when Vince finally pushes all of Jon's buttons, the conflagration is a knockout. Riu's Amy is smart and self-assured, both powerful and vulnerable.
Daniella Schwimmer's costumes are just right; she dresses the shabby-chic Vince, for instance, in unhemmed polyester plaid old-man pants. Set designer Rich Simone delivers as always, giving Vince a Motel 6 room with water stains on the ceiling and scuff marks on the peeling wallpaper.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Tuesday, November 21, 2000
Carbonell winner explodes again in GableStage's Tape
By Jack Zink, Theater Critic
Paul Tei, who won a best actor Carbonell Award last week for his performance as a wacko killer in the GableStage's recent Popcorn, returns to the Coral Gables playhouse as a similar character in Tape. This time he's Vince, a grudge-bent drug-culture wacko who never got over being jilted by his high school squeeze.
Tei has already proven himself capable of more conventional lead roles, but seems to relish the nutcases a little too much. For the moment, though, the results are unquestionably right. The mood is predictably tense and the action explosive in Tape as Tei baits and browbeats his prey in a cheap, messy motel room.
His victims are Christopher Carlisle as former best buddy Jon, who has become a slick-talking movie maker, and Michelle Riu as ex-girlfriend Amy, who's now an assistant district attorney.
Vince wants to know why Amy didn't have sex with him during their high school romance but did with Jon in a subsequent affair. More than that, Vince wants to know whether his suspicion that Jon committed date rape is correct. If that's the case, it's time for payback.
But what if it was mutual passion? Can Vince live with that? Can Jon?
Stephen Belber's one-act drama (it runs just over an hour) was among the more interesting entries at last spring's Humana Festival of New Plays in Louisville, Ky. It's right up Joe Adler's dramatic alley, and the GableStage producing artistic director bowls a strike with this production.
In addition to the design team's latest dead-on scenic, lighting and costume collaborations, Carlisle and Riu refuse to yield their own stage presence to their "potentially violent" antagonist. All that's important because Tape has a lot more momentum than substance. If neither Adler nor his cast could keep our ears pinned back as well as they do, the unanswered questions that seem so teasing would become patently annoying.
That flaw hasn't hurt the play's commercial prospects. Adler opened his season with it in order to be ahead of a film version that's awaiting release, starring Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard.
Belber's tale, inspired by a real-life romantic triangle, unfolds Vince's plan like a mystery at first. Then, Belber turns the tables when the girl, now a professional woman accustomed to swimming with sharks, uses Vince's own tactics on him. Never at any time does Belber answer the crucial question(s) definitively.
