Fool For Love by Sam Shepard. Directed by Brenna Geffers. EgoPo Classic Theater. Through February 23, 2020, at the Latvian Society Theater, 531 N. 7th Street, Philadelphia. (267) 273-1414 or egopo.org.
Love, hate. Attraction, loathing. Stay, go. Push me, pull me.
The goings-on in this drama may seem surreal but it’s a story familiar to many of us, about relationships that are bad but impossible to break off.
Almost all of us have seen couplings which veer between extreme poles, that swing wildly from affectionate to destructive. We usually sense that there must have been true love at some point. In plays by Sam Shepard, however, we expect toxicity and violence.
It’s one of Shepard’s best known plays, familiar because there was a movie version starring Shepard himself, but Fool for Love is rarely produced on local stages. This production is the middle installment in EgoPo’s season devoted to the dramas of Shepard, who died in 2017 at the age of 73. He was perceived to be an isolated, tormented figure, like the Old Man in this play.
One approach to the script is to emphasize the unsettling, surreal elements. This production by Brenna Geffers puts more emphasis on the human.
When the protagonists touch each other, right after the man’s entrance, we see genuine affection in their eyes, thanks to the intimacy of the small playing space in the Latvian Society building. Quickly thereafter, hostility flares. But first this production grounds us with something that audience members can relate to.
Even the set is a simple and neutral motel room rather than a claustrophobic grotesquerie. (EgoPo presented a more ominously atmospheric set in Shepard’s Buried Child in October.)
The usual reaction to a Shepard play is “These people are weird.” This production prompts the somewhat different, “Weird things are happening to these people.”
A woman in a motel room is surprised by the sudden entry of a man she’s known since childhood, with whom she’s clearly had an on-again off-again relationship. Eddie urges May to come live with him in a trailer on a farm. She vehemently resists.
As with other Shepard family dramas, secrets are shockingly revealed. The instrument for disclosure is an elderly man sitting to the side, holding a guitar, who intermittently speaks to Eddie and May. We come to see that he’s the reminder of their pasts who exists in their minds, and his relationship to each of them is the key to the drama.
Because this play has been in circulation since 1983, and a movie version is out there too, I believe that I may reveal the similarity between Fool for Love and Wagner’s Die Walkure. Both of them ask the question: Since a brother and sister have so much in common, isn’t it natural for them to have a sexual relationship too?
Late in the play we learn that the Old Man led a secret double life, abandoning two women and the children he fathered. May and Eddie became lovers in their high school years and only learned about their family relationship later.
Julianna Zinkel plays May as a wounded woman, mysteriously vague. Jered McLenigan is impetuous and bullying as Eddie, but essentially relatable. Steven Wright captures the innocence and naivety of Martin, May’s date for that evening. The venerable actor and director Joe Canuso plays the Old Man laconically, which adds to the aura of mystery but minimizes the threat of danger.