Review: Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, The Stage, Austin
by David Glen Robinson

 

The intensity of Sam Shepard plays leaves audiences in search of refreshing towels and stiff drinks. The powerful cast in The Stage Austin’s production of Fool for Love offers watchers in the audience no respite from the emotional jangling imposed on us.

 

Shepard’s plays rely on a significant recurrent theme, or leitmotif, of modern Western life. He frequently juxtaposes the struggles between those trying to escape the honky-tonk life and those sinking back into it. Horses, cattle, whiskey, and fast cars mark the imagery, symbols, and pivots of his plots.  For example, as the confrontation between Eddie and May builds,  Eddie struggles to put on his nickel spurs with their starlike rowels. He fails and returns to drinking to fortify his battle with May, symbolizing and foreshadowing his ultimate loss.

 

The significance of those spurs is not lost on folks west of the Mississippi river, but air-whiffs many of those east of it. This is a minute example, but it feeds into larger issues of the varying acceptance of Shepard’s plays. The program of the show gives us a conundrum without resolution: Fool for Love premiered as a play in 1983 in San Francisco and was made into a movie in 1985. Not until 2015 did the play open on Broadway, the performance capital of the east coast. Cultural difference may help resolve the conundrum. 

 

The play has a simple plot but vast emotional complexity. Eddie, played by Patrick Wheeler, roars back (“2463 miles") to the seedy hotel room residence of his mate May, played by Kathleen Fletcher,  a locale “on the edge of the Mojave Desert.” The performance lacks any other images or signatures of the Mojave. It serves purely as the symbol of the context of desolation pervading all the characters of the play. This play starts on the sandy floor and stays there.

 

Eddie has cheated on May, and she knows about it from watching TV. His intention is to leave her, but why has he come back? At first, she does not want to hear Eddie. She wants to drench him in her impressive vitriol and does exactly that. As a true cowboy, he bears up under it and responds defensively.  The drinking starts (continuity blip: the script discusses the drinks as tequila, but the fluid in the bottle is whiskey-colored).

 

The second half of the one-act play brings on Martin, played by Justin LaVergne, who is to be May’s date for the movies. He enters and falls face-first into the May-Eddie snake pit.

 

 

The final character of Fool for Love is Old Man/father, played by Michael Stuart. He's the “silent observer,” an element of magical realism in many plays, but not in Shepard’s. Old Man tells important stories when he steps out of his category as a silent observer and stands onstage as an embodied character. This transformation sends mixed messages. 

 

Kathleen Fletcher is advancing through a brilliant acting career. Her performances are nuanced yet chameleonic, her lines coordinated with the most minute physical expression, and she draws on a deep well of emotion that not all actors have. Fletcher brings it all as May. Her hair and styling were by Raquel Rivera (also the stage manager) and gave Fletcher/May that Western slattern look. Fletcher played it to perfection. She struggles to escape that kind of life and battles earnestly to leave it behind. 

 

Patrick Wheeler as Eddie matched Fletcher shout for shout, eyeroll for eyeroll. Heavy-set and well costumed, he's styled as the unkempt modern cowboy. His eyes were especially expressive as he participated in increasingly combative dialogues with May and Martin. Wheeler’s job on stage was to drive a powerful play powerfully, and one cannot imagine another actor with the presence and skill to match Wheeler's accomplishment. Kudos. 

 

Justin LaVergne’s Martin was a refreshing contrast to the passion all around him. He didn’t know what was going on until much later when the story had passed him by and ended. Shepard's story arc for Martin is rare and fascinating, and LaVergne played it beautifully.

 

 

In stellar contrast to all the verbal violence, Michael Stuart was quiet, clear, and understated, a marvelous stroke of directing by Jeff Hinkle. Stuart sat silently at the side of the stage or near a room with action that IRL would take place only in secure privacy. Is he real or a hologram or a sign like the hotel sign projected on the opposite side of the room? That question of presence and identity we cannot resolve through the play, but we focus intently on Old Man when he finally stands up and speaks.

 

It does not help that he breaks his silence during a discussion of who’s lying and who’s not. There's a problem here, a deep flaw in Shepard's play, but one that Hinkle and Stuart handle well. Shepard’s vision requires them to tell the character’s stories. Eddie’s dream story of walking through a surreal, muddy, whiskeyed night with his father helps, but if Old Man/father were to remain offstage and invisible, those stories would have greatly lessened impact. The revelations of these stories decide all the issues and strike a moral chip out of the psyches of both Eddie and May. 

 

Few characters since Oedipus have had such guilt carved into them, etched in misidentified love and desire. Shepard’s solution was to mix the old man/father categories arbitrarily and risk confusing the audience. And he does confuse the audience, against Stuart’s skillful performative efforts. Plot points off for this otherwise brilliant and beautifully produced play. 

 

The Stage Austin is an ambitious company abuilding. The company is physically turning an old events center (a Chinese buffet restaurant before that) into their dedicated theatre space. The well-respected Bennett Raccah Charitable Fund is a grant supporter of the company. The Stage Austin shows well justified bravura in taking on Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love.

 

The play runs July 10th through August 2nd at the former Sterling Events Center on Highway 290 in central Austin. 

 

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Fool for Love
by Sam Shepard
The Stage