Theater can capture our attention by trickery — think onstage helicopter in Miss Saigon or Richard III in a Civil War setting. But sometimes a device works so well that it transcends its gimmick. Such is the case with Stephen Belber’s Tape, the production that Theater of Thought is staging through May 4.
Tape is set in a motel room. No, really. At the Lighthouse Inn in South County, in an appropriately quiet off-season Galilee. You have to sit in a folding chair in an actual motel room or in the mini-bleachers outside, listening through speakers and peeking into the window with others, as though with a voyeur club inspired by Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.
Perhaps too much shouldn’t be made of the location, since it’s the play itself that promptly absorbs our attention. Two characters at first and eventually three confront an incident in the past that has af-fected each of them, or not, in unexpected ways.
As a play, Tape fascinates us by constantly unfolding, revealing new aspects of the story and the characters as it goes along for less than 90 minutes. We’re curious even before it begins, as we enter to find a character curled up asleep on the bed in his underwear, his back to us. Before he budges, we know that Vince (Tyler Fischer) isn’t exactly a neat freak. Clothing spills out of his backpack on the bed, and the room is littered with crumpled beer cans.
When he startles awake and rubs his eyes, we’re not sure whether the story has begun or we are witnessing the pre-show as he busies about for more than 10 minutes, wordlessly characterizing him-self. He practices a swagger as well as kung fu moves. He dumps out the contents of a couple more cans that he tosses around, so we know he wants to weirdly impress someone who’s coming. He sticks a rolled-up sock into his jockey shorts, so he wants to impress real bad.
We know this cocky guy in significant ways by the time his friend John (Michael A. LoCicero) shows up. We soon learn that this is Lansing, Michigan, where the next day a film of John’s is going to be screened at a festival. They were friends in high school. Now in their late 20s, if they can’t impress each other with what they’ve done with their lives so far, they can at least save face and avoid being humiliated. John should have the easier time of it, with his talk of wanting to someday contribute to the national conversation on American values. Vince works as a volunteer fireman in Oakland, but he makes his money dealing drugs to 50somethings, a safe demographic.
Most of the play consists of their give-and-take, as we wonder whether Vince putting him down is mere jealousy or an honest effort to save his old friend from living in delusion. The catalyst is Amy (Amber Kelly), whom they both dated in high school and who happens to live in Lansing. Now the can-you-really-know-someone theme gets even more interesting, as her memory of an event that disturbed the two men is widely at variance with theirs.
Directed by Rich Morra, Fischer’s antic intensity (he was a wonderful Mozart in URI’s recent Amadeus), LoCicero’s teetering between strength and vulnerability, and Kelly’s bemused mysteriousness make for an intriguing examination of the ambiguity of purpose and significance.
Back to the gimmick for a moment. Some time ago, I and the rest of an audience were taken by bus from the Actors Theater of Louisville to an outlying warehouse where the play, which took place in a landfill complete with bulldozers, was being staged by Jon Jory. The physicality of the experience was impressively visceral, but emotionally it was nothing compared soon afterward to an intimate little ad hoc performance of Pinter’s two-person Betrayal, staged up close and personal in a darkened office at URI, a disturbingly powerful performance. Which is to say that physical proximity means a lot in thea-ter when it is natural, honest, as opposed to the Living Theatre of the 1960s stomping up the aisles and shouting in our faces.
Amber Kelly’s Theater of Thought has demonstrated once again — its recent production of Neil LaBute’s Bash earned a lot of buzz — its imaginative attention to what a play wants to be, as well as its superb acting standards. How great to have such a promising new theater around when the promises are so well fulfilled.
