| . | 03/14/2009
Fool For Love
By: Deirdre Donovan
With the revival of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love--co-presented by The Bull and The Living Theatre--we can chart once again the Shepard vision of cattle herds, old cars, and even the silver screen image of Spencer Tracey. Shepard diehards will enjoy this opportunity to worship at the shrine of the playwright, and see a ferociously comic take on his classic. The Bull’s production may not be a perfect Fool for Love or a purist’s Fool for Love, but this pulp revival fires on all cylinders.
The story revolves around 3 young Midwesterners: the young rancher Eddie (the hip Kevin Shaffer), his former girlfriend May (the feisty Katie Bender), and her new suitor Martin (the understated Jonathan Wilde), the gentle outdoor maintenance man. The setting is a seedy motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, where the threesome will geographically converge and ponder their unrealized dreams. Eddie and May will, in turns, present their life stories, and attempt to buffalo each other with their individual versions of truth. Perhaps May has the best grip on what’s actually transpiring here. Or as she bluntly states to Eddie in the opening scene: “You’re either gonna erase me or have me erased.”
It would be cruel to divulge the evening’s bombshells, although many of you may be familiar with the play (first performed at the Magic Theater in San Francisco in 1983) or have enjoyed the 1985 film adaptation starring Sam Shepard and Kim Basinger. But there’s no harm in telling you that the story is like an indoor rodeo, and that rifle-slinging Eddie and the flint-willed May have known each other since high school, a good 15 years ago. And if a lurid secret hadn’t been uncovered about their past, the young couple might have lived happily ever after.
Those who wish to discover the dark secret in May’s and Eddie’s lives are forewarned that the truth unspools inch by inch over 90 minutes. The play blurs realism with hallucinogenic episodes, and the past and the present often bleed into one another. Not surprisingly, May and Eddie serve as the main chroniclers of their ill-fated love affair. And Martin, who literally crashes through the motel room door at the play’s midpoint, serves as a kind of witness to the emotional and physical melee. Though Martin’s original intention may have been to take May to a movie, he soon finds himself trapped in the motel room with them, becoming privy to the couple’s former romance and ultimate breakup.
The fourth figure, The Old Man (the reliable Bill Weeden), is so richly conceived by Shepard that the 3 other characters almost seem like extensions of his imagination. Simply referred to as The Old Man, he sits in a rocking chair to the extreme front left of the stage, wearing a scruffy outfit and cowboy hat, sipping liquor out of a brown paper bag. Eddie and May don’t immediately acknowledge his presence onstage. But The Old Man slowly becomes the center of attention, first making incisive verbal asides, and then insinuating himself into the action. While he’s by far the most taciturn character onstage, he literally and figuratively delivers the last word in the drama.
Director Katherine Krause infuses a clearly comic tone into the piece. She’s directing with broad strokes, more intent on conveying the surreal motifs in the drama than in fully etching the 4 character’s psychological depth. She gives us a whip-smart version of the classic, having the actors deliver their lines as if swallowing razor blades. William G. McGarvey has created a set that’s reminiscent of an Edward Hopper portrait, just a four-poster bed, a worn table and vinyl chairs, and a large picture window looking out on emptiness. Dan Zisson’s fight choreography is sharply aggressive, so audience members coming to the show for after-dinner relaxation will find themselves in for a decided jolt.
It could be argued that this play explores the tension between what you are and what society expects you to be, or thinks you are. The work also incredibly illuminates how lies eventually devour the liar, and equally incapacitates those involved in the deception. If the play is not Shepard at his best, it’s a solid offering from his impressive canon.
The critic Robert Brustein famously called Shepard the best “chronicler of motel culture.” Go to The Bull’s bang-up production of Fool for Love, and you’ll understand precisely why.
The The Living Theater, 21 Clinton Street (between Houston and Stanton Streets).
Tickets are $25 and are available online at http://www.livingtheatre.org . For more information, visit http://www.TheBullNYC.com
Through March 22.
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