Playhouse West Philadelphia presents Stephen Belber’s Tape

It's good that the piece is only about 90 minutes, because it'd feel exhausting otherwise. The two bickering main characters, Vince (Daniel River) and Jon (David Piccinetti), are selfish, deluded, and can even be shockingly stupid. But the pleasure of Belber's plot is how he never underestimates the characters or what they're capable of, even though they often underestimate each other. The play's provocations about truth, consent, and masculine one-upmanship belong as much to 2026 as they do to 1996.

High-school reunion gone wrong

The tension between the former Lansing, MI high-school friends, now in their late 20s, is palpable nearly from the moment Jon walks into Vince's Motel 6 room. Where Jon is an indie director debuting a movie at the local film festival, Vince is a low-level drug dealer (and volunteer firefighter) out in Oakland. The contrast between them is apparent in the costumes alone: Jon is well-dressed in his matching dress shirt and pants, not to mentioned that “cool” brown leather jacket. Meanwhile, Vince answers the door wearing only a sleeveless shirt and boxer briefs, cutting a Stanley Kowalski-like figure while he chugs a six-pack and tells his old pal that he's newly single. (Rivers is especially funny throwing beer cans around the stage with total abandon.)

Things start to turn after Jon not so subtly lectures Vince about making something of himself. “Occasionally you have a tendency to act in a phallic fashion,” he says of Vince's break-up. Vince retaliates by bringing up Jon's high-school fling with Vince’s ex-girlfriend, Amy (Olivia Prado), one that Jon doesn't want to think about. Then, after Jon confesses the truth about what happened between them, Vince reveals he recorded the whole thing. The rest of the play delves into what exactly happened that night and whether Jon and Vince want to do the right thing, or if they're merely trying to one-up the other.

Prelude to #MeToo

Tape feels eerily prescient about the #MeToo movement and the debates Americans started having in the late 2010s about consent and the very different ways people remember their sexual encounters. The play's back-and-forth banter between characters is arguably its weakest element—sometimes the dialogue feels forced by a writer overly in love with his own Gen-X dialogue, much like Kevin Smith—but also reinforces the story's moral ambiguity.

While Jon does seem guilt-stricken, he often tries to dodge any accountability for his actions, preferring the respectable image he's created for himself of a thoughtful artist. Vince is indifferent to the consequences of the scenario he's planned out, because really he wants to get back at his friend for sleeping with his ex 10 years ago. Only Amy, once she arrives at the hotel room, has any clarity about the situation and her own intentions. The male characters are stuck in high school (they even wrestle like teenagers), but she's an adult.

Intense and funny

Director Tony Savant wisely opens and closes his production with Eddie Cochran's early rocker “C'mon, Everybody”, exhorting his audience to party alongside him. Cochran is name-checked in Tape, but it's also the right song for a small production where the audience is forcibly locked into the characters' dysfunctions and toxic behaviors.

Luckily, the cast handily meets that challenge, unafraid to look ridiculous or go to dark places (Prado and Piccinetti both induced shocked gasps from the crowd at two crucial points). Belber's play walks a tricky tightrope, depicting characters who sometimes act like overgrown teens and still can play games with each other, knowing how to push buttons and how to use verbal manipulation.

I wouldn't dream of spoiling where those games end, except to say that Tape is a play that holds up for the “post-truth” era, where men can act like children, people don't always know what's true and what isn't, and some merely want to be right all the time. Belber knows that even a recording isn't proof of anything; it's one more weapon in a stockpiled arsenal.

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