With Stephen Belber’s TAPE, theater director Brook Hall has a hard-hitting final play for The LAB Space.
High school reunions are tricky. Some classmates have moved on in life, others have not. Some dredge up a past that others want to forget, especially when it involves sensitive matters like rape.
This one-act play opens and takes place in a very realistic, semi-grungy Motel 6 room in Lansing, Michigan, wonderfully put together by Ridge Production Studio.
Photo courtesy of Jamie Osho Mactography
TAPE is a demanding play for its actors, where all three characters must adapt to rapid-fire dialogue and changing emotions, but Hall chose a skilled team.
Lucas Salazar plays Vince, the volunteer fireman and drug dealer who allegedly has come to celebrate former high school friend Jon’s success in the film industry, but in reality seeks to expose why Amy, a girl that he and Jon dated, slept with Jon but not with him.
With great energy Salazar clearly delights in this manipulative and sinister role; he bounds about and plays on Jon’s sympathy while calculating his end game.
LAB veteran, John Brownlie, as Jon, has the challenging role of being the unsuspecting, blind-sided friend, trying to be helpful but slowly realizing Vince’s calculating subterfuge.
Enter Amy, Michelle Kao (高微嵐), who at first appears to be an unsuspecting pawn and spectator in Vince’s game of watching Jon squirm between guilt and apology.
Vince thinks he is in control and hopes to impress Amy until he realizes the strong, resilient Amy has moved on in her own way.
TAPE is a play with a high stakes end for all, where each character is pushed to the limit. The end comes quick — an end that will certainly linger in the viewer’s mind after the curtain falls.
Due to subject matter, no children under 16 are admitted without an adult guardian.
Words of the Year are not just interesting, they are telling. They are language and attitude barometers that measure what a country sees as important. The trending vocabulary around AI last year reveals a stark divergence in what each society notices and responds to the technological shift. For the Anglosphere it’s fatigue. For China it’s ambition. For Taiwan, it’s pragmatic vigilance. In Taiwan’s annual “representative character” vote, “recall” (罷) took the top spot with over 15,000 votes, followed closely by “scam” (詐). While “recall” speaks to the island’s partisan deadlock — a year defined by legislative recall campaigns and a public exhausted
The primaries for this year’s nine-in-one local elections in November began early in this election cycle, starting last autumn. The local press has been full of tales of intrigue, betrayal, infighting and drama going back to the summer of 2024. This is not widely covered in the English-language press, and the nine-in-one elections are not well understood. The nine-in-one elections refer to the nine levels of local governments that go to the ballot, from the neighborhood and village borough chief level on up to the city mayor and county commissioner level. The main focus is on the 22 special municipality
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
In the 2010s, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began cracking down on Christian churches. Media reports said at the time that various versions of Protestant Christianity were likely the fastest growing religions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The crackdown was part of a campaign that in turn was part of a larger movement to bring religion under party control. For the Protestant churches, “the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization,” according to a 2023 article in Christianity Today. That piece was centered on Wang Yi (王怡), the fiery, charismatic pastor of the
RSS