‘Fool for Love’: Inside Shepard’s battlefields

‘FOOL FOR LOVE’: Nina Arianda. Photo: Joan Marcus

FOOL FOR LOVE
Written by Sam Shepard
Directed by Daniel Aukin
Through December 6, 2015
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th Street
(212-239-6200), www.foolforlovebroadway.com

By David NouNou

Sam Shepard creates battlefields. From the moment the curtain rises on Fool for Love at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, you know you are in an arena where the fight is to the finish and there will ultimately be no winners. All you have to do is think of True West, Buried Child, and A Lie of the Mind and you can visualize all these battlefields littered with the souls of the vanquished.

Sam Shepard, like Harold Pinter or David Mamet, creates these arenas that rely less on structure but depend heavily on mind games. These are minefields that directors love to dissect and in which actors love to flex their acting chops. It’s not so much the plot lines that propel these stories forward but what the actors bring to advance these storylines. Their plays end up heavily indebted to interpretation, and as an audience member, each viewer ultimately has to come up with his or her own conclusion.

First presented in 1983, Fool for Love is finally making its Broadway debut. Set in a seedy motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, we meet Eddie (Sam Rockwell), sitting on a chair backstage center. Stage left, sitting on a bed, is May (Nina Arianda) and stage right, in a rocking chair, is a form of a Greek chorus, The Old Man (Gordon Joseph Weiss); or maybe he is the conscience of Eddie and May. From the onset, you know that round one has finished and round two is about to begin. Eddie and May have been in this relationship for the last 15 years and it has never been smooth sailing. It’s obvious they have a love/hate relationship and no matter where one of them escapes to, the other one will eventually find him/her. In between they get slammed a lot, and I mean a lot, mostly against walls and each other.

As an acting exercise, you can’t improve on the casting of Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda as Eddie and May respectively. They are both exciting and formidable performers and their chemistry is dynamite. Joseph Gordon Weiss gives The Old Man presence. The fourth person is the hapless Martin (Tom Pelphrey), who has the misfortune to arrive on this unfortunate night to pick up May for a date. Mr. Pelphrey’s incomprehension of the proceedings is a total gem.

Daniel Aukin directs his cast with a firm hand, but unfortunately the problem here is not the acting or the direction; it is the vastness of the stage. Although it is admirable to have a Shepard play presented on Broadway, the play has very strict confines in its parameters. That confine is claustrophobia, it swallows you whole and it is human nature to try to break free from its grasp. After all the setting is a small, seedy motel room in the Mojave Desert, the expanse of the Friedman stage, or for that matter any Broadway theater stage, makes it lose its claustrophobic sensibility and, in the process, that desperate tension that is so essential to this play is lost.

‘FOOL FOR LOVE”: Sam Rockwell & Nina Arianda. Photo: Joan Marcus

‘FOOL FOR LOVE’: Tom Pelphrey. Photo: Joan Marcus

‘FOOL FOR LOVE’: Gordon Joseph Weiss. Photo: Joan Marcus