Jose Rivera's play, "Tape," only has one scene: it is a
short, two-man play. The story's premise is that a man, "The Person," is meeting "The
Attendant" and becoming acclimated to his new surroundings. The conversation is casual
until the audience realizes that the Person is actually dead. In fact the structure of
the play is based upon the death of the Person, the foreshadowing of what is to come,
and the detailed elements of his "punishment."
title="foreshadowing"
href="http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_F.html">Foreshadowing
is:
readability="8">Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what
will occur later in a
narrative...We do not, as
the audience, know where the Person is, but it is either purgatory
or hell. There is suffering in this place, which means it is
not heaven. This an example of foreshadowing because we are told
that there is suffering (though we don't know what it refers to) as the Attendant tells
the Person:We
don't want to cause you any undue
suffering."Undue" means
unwarranted, so the Attendant is implying that there is suffering,
but that they don't want to administer more than is
deserved.The most horrifying event, seemingly "hellish" in
its presentation by the Attendant, is the fact that the Person will be spending a
very, very long time listening to all the lies he has ever told in
his life.We know this will take an extremely long time
because there are ten thousand boxes, of
reel-to-reel tapes of his lies, and
that the machine they will be using does NOT have a fast-foward
button.readability="22">Listening, word by word, to every lie you ever
told while you were alive…Every ugly lie to every person, every single time, every
betrayal, every lying thought, every time you lied to yourself, deep in your mind, we
were listening, we were recording, and it's all in these tapes, ten thousand boxes of
them, in your own words, one lie after the next, over and over until we're
finished.It is this
description that so powerfully outlines the "suffering" that lies ahead of the Person.
Strangely, while the Attendant is extremely cordial and eager to please at the beginning
of the play, he pulls absolutely NO punches when he lays everything
out in front of the Person, so that man knows not just that there is a record of all he
has done, but worse, that he will have to listen to it—relive it, all over
again.These are the events that mark the major elements in
the play's structure.Additional
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Rivera_(playwright)
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