Heritage Theatre’s “Fool for Love” lands punches
A talented cast of four, guided by strong directing from Rachel Finan, have brought Sam Shepard’s story of fiery star-crossed lovers to life in the Spectrum Theatre Blackbox.
Heritage Theatre Group’s current production of “Fool for Love” brings Sam Shepard’s 75 minute play to the intimate confines of the 50 seat Spectrum Theatre Blackbox. The production has much to offer and it begins with the acting of a talented cast of four.
Matt Simpson Siegel as Eddie and Brooke Bruce as May portray the fiery star-crossed lovers who struggle to separate themselves from a toxic relationship that is clearly not meant to be. Their performances reveal a passionate attraction for one another as well as a passion for the physical and verbal abuse of one another.
The action of the play is punctuated by what seems to be an excessive amount of screaming, yelling, and door slamming. These high decibel moments pile up throughout the evening and yield more heat than light and contribute little to our understanding of Eddie and May.
Siegel provides a better insight into Eddie with less volume as he calmly explains his plans for the future to May or his version of the couple’s past history. We see the wheels turning as he calculates his adversaries’ strengths and weaknesses and in his mental shifts from moment to moment as he reacts to information from other characters.
Bruce’s best scenes occur when she reacts to her off and on cowboy lover with a quiet seething burn that comes from the place where she has lived for years. She’s a gifted physical actress and finds ways to show her discontent and resentment by draping herself over a chair, curling into a fetal position on the bed or readying herself for an evening out and away from Eddie.
Michael Kohlenberger is Martin, May’s date, who unwittingly enters the mayhem of the Mojave motel room. He presents an appropriately nerdy foil for Eddie, as well as a more normative character and sounding board from the outside world. As Kohlenberger’s character listens to the story of Eddie and May unfold, he registers an understanding that he has clearly wandered into the wrong arena and is among combatants way beyond his weight class.
Gary E. Mitchell, as the Old Man, has a knack for spinning the kind of half-truth yarns which may or may not be substantiated by others in the play. Mitchell makes his character much more than a dramatic device for revelation. His seemingly affable rocking chair alcoholic becomes a menacing intrusion on the current lives of Eddie and May. He is more feared than revered: for the dark secrets he holds, the seeds of destruction he sows, and a refusal to see the lives he has ruined.
Credit director Rachel Finan with telling the story of “Fool for Love” with variety of movement in a small space with a limited acting areas.
Lighting designer Kenneth Judge and his crew add to the drab motel interior with special lighting effects that signify threats to the couple’s fragile relationship from an unseen hostile world outside.
Although this 35 year old play depicting a knock-down-drag-out love relationship in a desert motel lands some punches, the impact of the late playwright’s script from decades past has diminished with the passing of the years.
That’s not the fault of this production or Sam Shepard. The kind of alienated and disaffected anti-heroes that Shepard writes about now seem commonplace in our entertainment on stage and screen .Let it be noted that Shepard was an early practitioner of this kind of writing in the American theatre.The shock value of content in “Breaking Bad,” “Shameless,” and television reality series, has taken much of the “fun,” so to speak, out of dysfunction.
The play contains adult situations and will not please all comers. Despite this, “Fool for Love” and other works by Shepard, one of America’s most important Twentieth Century playwrights, are rightly enjoying revivals in recent years.
“Fool for Love”
Written by Sam Shepard
Directed by Rachel Finan
Heritage Theatre Group at Spectrum Theatre
July 26-August 4
Tickets here.
