jaxmom28's Full Review: Sam Shepard - Fool for Love & the Sad Lament of Pe...
“To be performed relentlessly without a break.”
With these instructions author Sam Shepard warns his actors and his readers of the emotional marathon upon which they are about to embark in Fool for Love. The warning isn’t as dire as “relinquish all hope, ye who enter here,” but it’s just as serious. Relentlessly. Remember that word, because Shepard means it.
Set in a run-down roach trap of a motel in the middle of the Mojave desert, the play focuses mainly on two central characters, May and Eddie. They are a couple; they are deeply in love. They are individuals; they are deeply in hate. They’ve been together, off and on, for 15 years. In a relationship sometimes approaching Grand Old Soap Opry proportions, May and Eddie threaten to leave, throw each other out, beg one another to stay. They cry; they rage; they moan. Interspersed with the episodes of shrieking and blaming are the moments of very real, very honest, love and affection between the two characters.
This is no high school love. It is not sweetness and light, nor sugar and cream. There are no butterflies or rainbows when these two meet, but there is an honesty and a vulnerability that is palpable. It sits, heavily, on your shoulder. They want to move on; they want to leave one another and the pain they cause each other, but each needs the other too much. They are emotional cripples and cannot function for more than a little while without the other. These two people are disturbed. They are hurt, angry, jealous, needy, confused, possessive. Eddie and May embody the many faces of love in all it’s forms – romantic, familial, seductive…
Wait a minute, did she say familial?
I did.
There is a third important character, called only The Old Man, who spends much of the play in the shadows, but he is always there. Eddie’s father, he is, and dead. He is a memory Eddie carries with him. The Old Man likes to give Eddie advice, and to tell him stories of or reminisce about the double life he led when Eddie was a child. The Old Man was a bigamist. He split his time between his Eddie family, and his other family. He had a daughter in this other family. A daughter named May.
This sounds way over the top.
Yes, it does, doesn’t it? But it isn’t.
Shepard treats the moments of grand drama with such deeply seated sincerity that one forgets one is watching (or reading) histrionics. Instead of remaining aloof, the reader allows him- or herself to be snatched up and dropped, quite deliberately, in the darker corners of the characters’ psyches.
This is a play, not a book, and thus much of the fill is left to the reader. Do not look for florid descriptions or tons of exposition, that’s not what this play is about. The power is in the dialogue, in the intense and stripped- down interplay between lovers, between father and son, between author and audience.
Relentless.
Oh yes it is. And it will leave you exhausted. And you will never forget it.
Characters: Eddie, May, The Old Man, Martin
Awards: Obie Award, Best Off-Broadway Play
Length: One act play, roughly 80 pages.
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