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October 8, 2015
Review: Fool for Love

3905Playwright Sam Shepard and director Robert Woodruff were on a roll together in the late 1970s and early 1980s, teaming up for a series of well-received dramas centered on that favorite of themes: The American Family. Curse of the Starving Class (1978), the Pulitzer-winning Buried Child (1978), True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1981) all explored familial dysfunction, often with elements of surreal mystery and dabs of dark humor.

Now Manhattan Theater Club has revived Fool for Love on Broadway, directed by Daniel Aukin. What this staging underscores is the play’s relative spareness. If it seems less filling than some of the other Shepard plays from this era, it’s in part simply because it is an intermission-less 75 minutes long. Also, Shepard’s focus is predominantly on a pair of characters, and he gives us less matter to hang on to (or to try to grab hold of) than he does with some of the other plays from that same period. Fool for Love feels, frankly, like a long one-act play. MTC might have considered pairing it with another, shorter Shepard piece as a curtain-raiser to give playgoers the sense of a full evening of theatre.

Audience identification with his characters is something Shepard seems not to be especially interested in. His creations exhibit recognizable human behavior, but they’re not always easy people to feel for, in part because they seem designed to carry weight as archetypal figures. In Fool for Love we have a squabbling just-reunited couple in a cheap hotel room (designed with appropriately low-ceilinged, wood-paneled ugliness by Dane Laffrey) somewhere in the middle of the mythological American West. We piece together what we can about cowboy/stuntman Eddie (Sam Rockwell) and his lover May (Nina Arianda) as they engage in a passionate neo-Strindbergian Do-si-do of Death that is almost comical in the way it bounces back and forth between fury and tenderness, between the desire to clutch the beloved and to make a clean getaway. Eventually, with the help of a character sitting on the edge of the stage called (meaningfully) The Old Man (Gordon Joseph Weiss), along with the intrusion of May’s “date” Martin (Tom Pelphrey), the tangled mystery of Eddie and May’s relationship becomes disentangled (if not absolutely clear). But when their deep, dark secret is revealed, does it really seem all that shocking to 2015 audiences?

3904The principal reason to see this play is, unsurprisingly, the performances of Rockwell and Arianda. Both give fine turns, and their teamwork is strong. Eddie is the showier of the two parts—he struts and drawls and lassos motel furniture. Rockwell invests the character with a knowing sense of humor that, when fueled with tequila, exhibits itself in bursts of clownish yet saddle-smart wit. His Eddie is certainly no dumb hick. Arianda makes a fairly familiar sort of character seem fresh, thanks to her unwavering concentration and her talent for making spoken dialogue sing.

Weiss and Pelphrey also do admirable work, but there’s nothing, it seems, that the cast or director Aukin can do to bring to bring a full plate of grits-and-gravy to Shepard’s lean table.

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Written by: Mark Dundas Wood
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