Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

As Stephen Belber’s one-act “Tape” opens, two old friends reunite in a Motel 6 hotel room in a city far from their homes. Neither one is particularly likable; Jon (Michael Weems), an emerging indy filmmaker, is snide and passive-aggressive; Vince (Matt Klane), a pot-dealing volunteer firefighter, is of the aggressive-aggressive variety. From the start, we see Vince carefully setting the stage before Jon arrives, and it soon becomes clear that he’s intentionally pushing his old friend’s buttons. Vince is obsessed with a 10-year-old secret, and he’s trying to get Jon to confess.

As Jon, Weems strikes one note repeatedly: His speech is clipped and superior, which gets the Cliff’s Notes version of his character across quickly but provides little variety to his reactions or cadence. Klane is more animated as Vince, often to good effect. Of the three actors on stage (Sara Towber also appears as another ex-classmate), he appears to be the only one with some blood in the game; while the stakes are supposedly high for the other two, they ask each other questions and deliver plot reversals as if by rote.

The direction, by Christine Vinh Weems, seems most concerned with keeping the action moving (crucial in a one-room staging of psychological warfare), but the script piles one twist atop another, and none was allowed time to breathe before the next came along. There’s a seed of suspense in “Tape,” but without a sharper sense of the characters, it doesn’t ever take root.

Michael Weems’s “Waiting Life,” a short play that opens the night, has the opposite problem. Essentially two monologues, it becomes clear that we know these characters a bit too well: a woman and a man, each discussing their approach to dating in the city. Emily Ehlinger and Jade Rothman are engaging in the roles, but there’s not much in the script we haven’t heard before. The piece’s most touching moment comes as the two confess their faults and explain the nature of their characters to each other: It’s pleasant in a familiar way, but how much better it would have been had it surprised.