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Casey Stern steps into the breach, downstage center on the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre's queer–shaped stage actually facing into an aisle and out the door. But Casey, who along with Brian Tamm and Esther Biggs produces Thrusday Afternoon Productions, is all low key and informal, and says there's a lot of smoking in the play, and he hopes we don't mind.
How can you mind a mind game? Tape is a mind game.
It starts with the dead–on motel room. You've been there. You'll be there. It may be perpetual.
Stephen Belber may have had visions of Jean–Paul Sartre's No Exit dancing in his head when he wrote Tape, and he's got the hell on earth locale just right. The characters who become each others' demons are right too. And so is the world beyond the Motel Six, the world where we are when we watch this play, in real time, while the world around us simultaneously simmers to a boil and freezes each us into a solid sheet of alienation.
Esther Biggs has a feeling for all of that in her direction of Tape.
In fact there's so much right about Tape, you tend not to notice what's wrong. Drew Blair sets this up as Vince in the opening beats of the play. Vince will be our point of view character for most of the play, but from the beginning Vince knows something we don't. That allows the play to seem very clever, but whether it really is clever is something we can only judge later, after we have been tricked.
In Tape we function as an uninformed audience. That doesn't mean we don't know, for instance, that the Republicans just stole this election more smoothly than they did the last one; it simply means that the audience doesn't know the facts of the story, the scope of which subsumes the plot—but leaves us out. Leaves us in the dark along with Vince's buddy, or enemy, it's hard to say, Jon.
Thursday Afternoon Productions likes to come at you with the eerily familiar, like, well, Thursday afternoons.
A young dude is trashing a Motel Six room in a non–drunken un–rage. What is up with this, with his calculated manner?
Drew Blair plays Vince, "stringing the pearls" as he has been enjoined to do by his acting teacher, the esteemed Dr. David Shelton, who espouses a sytematic approach along the lines of Constantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov. He piles choice upon choice, and 2 when he hits the same choice more than once he plays it like a repeating note to make a song out of it.
Alan LeJean is Jon, a preening smarmy Hurrah for Hollywood winner with a crooked face who seems to learn in the course of time, as is said, the penalty one pays for heedless pleasure.
Both of these guys are good. They've got everything going on for them: eyebrows, you name it. It's all going on. It's gotta be. The script can only do so much. And why is that? Because when the audience is kept in the dark, there's only so much intelligence we can gain in the course of the evening to offset our ignorance. Which is another way of saying the performances become all. It's all good. Plus it's fun to watch two guys act ("Give me two players and a passion," Moliere said) and trade back and forth which one's the asshole.
It's good when who's the asshole keeps changing. It keeps the audience on their toes. By this time you've realized that we must be a special audience indeed. And indeed we are. However many of us there are. Houses have been small through the first half of Tape's run. The cultural scene in general has been depressed in Gainesville lately, as if the energy had been sucked out by the election, won by the phillistines. And the press has not been good. For one thing, the Satellite hasn't published my theatre pieces in three of the last four issues, and for another the Gainesville Sun continues to marginalize the theatre and the arts in general.
Perhaps the greatest fascination in Tape until Julie Tidwell enters lies in the spectacle of Drew Blair actually guzzling two or three beers, which makes his line mastery even that much more impressive. As you know, line mastery is what impresses the laity: "How do you remember all those lines?"
Julie Tidwell enters and everything else has just been waiting. But this time, as Amy—the object of attention, Tidwell is like a tennis player conent to volley from the back line, sending winner after winner arcing over the net, she can mesmermerize both the guys and the audience.
The beauty of Tape is that it unfolds in real time. If the performances are captivating, and they are, then we in the audience cannot help but reflect on the drama of our lives every minute. And just as in the play, our being, our personality, our psyche, is changing over time. The flaw of the play is that these considerations, the best part about the play, are outside the play. It's what we think while we're watching the play—as our mind drifts away from it and centers on our selves, our pitiful and pitiable selves.