Set's Larger, but "Fool for Love"
keeps tight feelingby Clifford A. Ridley
Inquirer Theater Critic
Click on picture for larger image.Princeton - Everything in the rundown, godforsaken motel-room setting McCarter Theatre's new production of Fool for Love is arranged as Sam Shepard's detailed stage directions ordain -- the iron bed, the rickety metal table, the plain picture window, the old man rocking silently on the apron. The only extra touch, fixing the play's location on the edge of the Mojave Desert, consists of tumbleweeds scattered on the forestage.
But there's one big change: The room itself, traditionally a tiny suffocating prison, stretches the width of the McCarter’s huge stage. And although you might think such a vast space would dwarf the people in it -- notably Eddie and May, the damned lovers whose past, present and future are illuminated in the play’s 90 minutes -- this somehow doesn’t happen.
True, the production forgoes the claustrophobia that we associate with Fool for Love, the sense of two cursed people trying to escape the womb of their destiny as they hurl themselves and each other against the walls. What it gains, however, is a sense of the epic enormity of their struggle, epic not just in its futility but in the courage of the attempt.
It does so because what Robert Brill’s set sacrifices in confinement, it gains in impregnability. The forbidding, unadorned walls seem constructed of foot-thick steel; when the doors slam, as they do frequently, they do so not with the bass-drum boom that Shepard suggests but with an echoing clang, the sort of ominous reverberation often associated with Greek tragedy. And indeed the set resembles the sort of courtyard in which Greek tragedy is usually set.All of which makes sense, for Shepard’s play, (one of his most accessible, once you acknowledge the old man’s role as merely a presence in May and Eddie’s minds) betrays clear echoes of the Greeks’ occupation with past sins as progenitors of present anguish, incest being the most heinous sin of all. Because of who they are, Eddie and May are at once inextricably linked and terminally estranged, incomplete when their separated yet unfailingly toxic when they’re together.
But there’s another myth at work in Fool for Love: that of the pioneer American West and its quintessential hero, the cowboy. In the decline of the lone, principled tamer of the open range, Shepard sees the withering of the American spirit, the onset of cultural impotence. Eddie is one of these anachronisms: He brandishes his gun, stomps roughly around the room, menaces May and her would-be suitor, Martin, but it’s all a pose. He’s washed up, reduced to using his lariat to aimlessly lasso motel bedposts.
James Morrison is splendid in this difficult role, adroitly embodying not just the character’s swagger and jealousy, but his considerable tenderness as well. Laila Robins is equally fine as the mercurial May, so conflicted about Eddie that it’s no surprise to see her follow a passionate kiss with a vicious kick to the groin. Her desperate desire to be rid of Eddie is painfully apparent, but so is her desperation at the prospect of that happening. And in the end, when her future is painfully apparent, she is deeply touching.
Glenn Fleshler is a first-rate Martin, keeping the character’s simplicity well short of caricature, and Mark Hammer is aptly crusty and querulous as the old man. Emily Mann’s direction, deftly uniting the play’s themes, confronts the huge playing space as an opportunity to explore the play’s almost musical restlessness in a larger-than usual context; and Brian MacDevitt’s lighting, abruptly shifting from warm to cold in tandem with the play’s temperature, is stunning.
