✭✭✭✭✩

by Sam Shepard, directed by Ted Dykstra

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Harbourfront Theatre Centre, Toronto

October 1, 2005

Soulpepper’s first shot at Sam Shepard doesn’t score a bull’s-eye but it comes close.  “Fool for Love” from 1983 is one of Shepard’s most succinct allegories about the insoluble paradoxes that define the United States.  The Soulpepper production captures the play’s theatricality and symbolism but does not disturb as much as it should.

The play is set the room of a seedy motel in the Mojave Desert.  Designer Steve Lucas makes this an archetypal space by giving it high irregular walls and voiding it of all decoration save a central four-poster bed.  Sound designer John Gzowski follows Shepard’s stage directions to make this a battleground by miking the walls to amplify the booms every time doors are slammed or walls pounded.

The love-hate struggle between the cowboy Eddie (Stuart Hughes) and the lone woman May (Megan Follows) represents not just the general conflict between male and female but more specifically two incompatible sides of the American Dream--one longing for new frontiers and freedom, the other for home and refuge.  Hughes, decked out with spurs and lasso, is perfect as a swaggering Marlboro Man gone to seed.  A steely Follows, by turns despairing and sensuous, needs to ratchet her intensity a notch up to match Hughes’s.  Watching and commenting on the scene is the Old Man (Frank Moore).  His decrepit, delusional nature would be more unsettling if Moore played him less as a parody.  A comic Kevin Bundy steals the show as the hapless wimp Martin who stumbles in on a psychic war far beyond his comprehension.                 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-08-18.

Photo: Stuart Hughes as Eddie. ©2005 Soulpepper.