Tape

Synopsis

When aspiring filmmaker Jon meets up with his best friend from high school, Vince - a volatile drug-dealing dropout, the conversation turns to Amy, Vince's first love, whom they both dated. Vince finally gets Jon to confess a disturbing secret, only then to reveal he has taped the entire conversation and that Amy is about to arrive any minute...

Our Review:

4 August 2003

Stephen Belber's triangular buddy drama Tape bizarrely unspools its central plot device in its very title. But that's not the only throwaway gesture in a play that recalls the work of any number of other American writers and the self-conscious echoing of situations and dialogue that fails to feel either organic or original.

The result feels as if Kenneth Lonergan had fast-forwarded ten years on from This is Our Youth and reunited its three protagonists - while also throwing in a bit of David Mamet's Oleanna for a spot of up-to-the-minute sexual politics. But it's not as surprising or incendiary as either.

Vince, a dope dealer who improbably doubles as a volunteer firefighter, still more improbably finds himself in a grimy motel room in Lansing, Michigan. He's in town to attend the Film Festival premiere of the latest movie to be directed by his best buddy from his schooldays, Jon. Since the local Assistant Distric...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (82.35.56.7) - 12 August 2003:

I didn’t hate the play, nor did I like it. It did however, from time to time, annoy the hell out of me, the whiney Americans saying ‘Dude’ al la Wayne’s World really grated. The acting is fine I suppose, it’s just that the material is so paper-thin. The play had no mystery element for me, it did not intrigue me. I did not see any of their motivations, frankly I didn’t really care. Amy was totally anodyne, the direction at best pedestrian and the fight scene ludicrous; it got more laughs than some of the jokes. All in all a bit of slightly annoying American psychobabble dressed (and as serious as the subject is, it is a resolutely light play) up as something so much more. Dominic Fumusa (nice legs by the way) and Josh Stamberg are probably rather good actors and I would have really liked to have seem them in something better than this insipid nonsense. ...

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