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    A Study Guide for Jose Rivera's "Tape"
    A Study Guide for Jose Rivera's "Tape"
    A Study Guide for Jose Rivera's "Tape"
    Ebook43 pages25 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jose Rivera's "Tape"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jose Rivera's "Tape," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 12, 2016
    ISBN9781535834681
    A Study Guide for Jose Rivera's "Tape"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Jose Rivera's "Tape" - Gale

      13

      Tape

      José Rivera

      1992

      Introduction

      José Rivera's short play Tape was published in a group of plays called Giants Have Us in Their Books: Six Children's Plays for Adults in 1992 and first performed in 1993. The play explores the relationship between a sinner being punished in the afterlife for lies he told while alive and the supernatural being tasked with guiding him through the process of listening to reel-to-reel tapes of every single one of those lies … all ten thousand boxes' worth of them. Tape, like most of Rivera's work, is written in a magical-realist style, as first popularized by fiction writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Magical realism incorporates supernatural or fantastic elements within straightforward depictions of reality to create a world in which magic is not only possible but accepted.

      Despite the occasional use of profanity, Tape is an appropriate introduction to the genre of magical-realist drama for middle- and high-school students. Although Rivera's Giants Have Us in Their Books is no longer in print, Tape can also be found in 30 Ten-Minute Plays for 2 Actors, a volume of plays from the Actors Theatre of Louisville's ten-minute play contest, edited by Michael Bigelow Dixon, Amy Wegener, and Karen Petruska.

      Author Biography

      Rivera was born on March 24, 1955, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but moved to Long Island with his family when he was five years old, where his father was a taxi driver. Childhood exposure to the oral storytelling tradition of his Puerto Rican grandparents, combined with seeing a production of Rumpelstiltskin at the age of twelve, convinced him that he wanted to be a writer, and soon after he wrote his first play. I was lucky, he told the New York Times in 2006, because my grandparents, who lived with us, were illiterate but they were great storytellers, so I got a kind of storytelling bug from them. After he received his BA in theater from Denison University, in Ohio, in 1977, Rivera considered a career in acting. As an apprentice actor at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, he met and worked with a young Tom Hanks. Witnessing Hanks's passion and talent for acting made Rivera realize that he felt the same way about playwriting.

      In 1989, Rivera was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in England, where he completed his play Marisol, which went on to receive an Obie Award for Best Play in 1993. He attended the Sundance Institute's writing workshop to study under Gabriel

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