Ten Years After
Adulthood, it’s said, is like high school with more toys. The adage ridiculously assumes that the high school experience is unanimously playful, ignoring that percentage of teens who find the locker-partner years akin to psychic water torture. Onstage in the Black Box theater at Johnson County Community College is irrefutable evidence of the scars it leaves behind.
Stephen Belber’s play Tape opened last weekend in a riveting production that marks the immensely auspicious debut of a new theater company called Down Every Street Productions. Its founders say they’re dedicated to staging work more prickly than that to which suburban audiences are accustomed. So far, the company is one for one.
Ten years after high school, two friends reconvene outside the stilted confines of an overplanned reunion. The location is a dingy Motel 6 in Lansing, Michigan; as envisioned by set designer Nate Rose, the bedspreads, the curtains and the sheet covering a closet are blue against piss-yellow concrete-block walls. A black-light, paint-by-numbers landscape above the beds is as crude and unskilled as Vince (Peter Macy), the pot dealer and volunteer firefighter who calls the meeting.
His old friend Jon (Mitch McCann) has done much better in life; he’s a fledgling filmmaker whose movie is about to be screened at a hometown festival. Vince compliments his pal’s achievements and then, just as quickly, ridicules them. “Oh, right,” Vince says, “you’re contributing to the debate about why this country is so fucked up.”
Vince points out with a dose of venom that he’s a Motel 6 kind of guy whereas Jon is more Radisson, the hotel where the festival sponsors have placed him. Jon wears $150 shoes; Vince pads around the room like a caged tiger in socks, one white and one black, both revealing his toes.
Their chatter is spurred on by a few beers, half a reefer and a couple of lines of coke before Vince revisits an old slight. Senior year, his girlfriend left him and had a sexual encounter with Jon. Whether it was consensual flames the debate, but Vince isn’t just operating from jealousy — he’d never had sex with the girlfriend, which makes him a wounded (and considerably shellshocked) veteran of the home-room wars.
The intensity and awkwardness are compounded when she shows up. Amy (Patricia Carrier) is now an assistant district attorney in Lansing. Though not overly primped, she’s quite sure of herself; she has a way with words, as lawyers do, and a formidable presence. What unfolds is better left to these very capable actors and Belber’s intriguing script, one that combines the he-said, she-said dynamics of David Mamet’s Oleanna with the questionable sexual politics of Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things.
The dialogue and action never seem stagey; Down Every Street cofounder Natalie Stackhouse directs the play with a steady hand but is also willing to experiment. In one long scene, for example, Vince and Jon are at opposite ends of the large set, one that’s probably the exact dimensions of a Motel 6 room, if not a little bigger. To follow their quickly paced banter, audience members must move their heads back and forth as if they’re at a vicious tennis match. The show seems well-rehearsed (except on opening night, when a couple of cans of beer had been juggled a bit much and caused unplanned geysers).
The actors are well-studied, matched perfectly to their characters’ angst. McCann and Carrier sketch Jon and Amy with zealous strokes, but Macy’s work is almost religious — it’s spooky at times. Vince’s emotions are dulled by the chemicals in his system, yet he’s an open wound. He pounces and bounces all over the stage but never feels out of control. The kid’s only 20 and still a JCCC student, but it’s a privilege to see him.
