Broadway Theater Review: Fool for Love

Fools Abound, but the Lasso Work is the Most Impressive Part
By Lauren Yarger
Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love is another one of those revivals that has me scratching my head. With all the really great material out there, both new works and plays that deserve a Broadway revival, I have to question why plays like this one get the nod.

This Manhattan Theatre Club production, which was staged last year at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, is dark with unlikable characters in a dark setting (a seedy Mohave Desert motel designed Dane Laffrey) and even when their dark circumstances are revealed, we’re too depressed to feel a lot of sympathy. Did you get the dark theme?  It’s the kind of depressing story that the Pulitzer Prize committee likes: the play was a finalist when it premiered in 1983.

But for me, there just isn’t much in the story with which I can relate. Director Daniel Aukin casts two charismatic stars – Nina Arianda (who brought to life Venus in Fur) and Sam Rockwell (A Behanding in Spokane, The Way Way Back), but despite good performances and some really nifty lasso work by Rockwell -- that for me, was the most interesting part of the play (thank you Movement and Fights Director David S. Leong) -- there isn’t enough to work with here to make this 75-minute, one-act play exciting.

Eddie (Rockwell) and May (Arianda) are lovers reunited at the motel. They have a lot of history, ostensibly connected with “The Old Man” (Gordon Joseph Weiss) who is seated just outside the motel room door and who adds some details to their story from time to time, including the information that he apparently is married to Barbara Mandrell (what that has to with anything? Your guess is as good as mine).

Movie stuntman Eddie has driven for days to find May to convince her to leave her current love interest, Martin (Tom Pelphrey),  and come live with him in a trailer on some land in Wyoming (I kind of could relate when she doesn’t jump at that thrilling offer, but that was about it….) Eddy is almost abusive at her rejection, about the fact that she is seeing someone else and at her reluctance to begin their relationship cycle again. Somehow they can’t seem to stay away from each other, even though they know it would be best.

Naïve Martin seems like he probably isn’t worth getting into a relationship with either, especially when the Old Man reveals some startling information about the former lovers (OK, this is where the ‘fool” part comes in, because if anyone I were dating dropped this little bomb, I would have run very quickly from the seedy motel room, where, you know, I wouldn’t have gone in the first place. So not relating to any of this….)

I don’t mind dark, or even stories I can relate to personally if there is something to be learned. Shepard apparently wants us to think about how we can’t control who we love and issues of identity. I just think about how we can control where spend $150 on a theater ticket.

Fool for Love plays through Dec. 13 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47^th St., NYC. Peformances are Tuesday and Wednesday 7 pm; Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8 pm; Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 2 pm (check schedule changes Thanksgiving week; no matinee Dec. 9). Tickets $70- $150: foolforlovebroadway.com; (800) 432-7250.