Return to AARO
When it first premiered in 1983, Sam Shepard's Fool For Love went over much of the same ground that he enjoyed exploring so much...passion, insatiable love, fate, incest and the West. The attraction of this piece for actors and directors is the power of its spare, poetically simplistic dialogue and the intensity of the situation, which plays out, without intermission, over an hour and twenty minutes in a rundown motel room somewhere west of the Mississippi. Here, a cowboy and a small-town girl struggle against their condemned love and bounce off the walls, tearing apart each other and those around them with what they can't have and can't resist.
It's not that Shepard hadn't done all of the same things with his earlier plays, such as the much adored Buried Child, but his blending of the in-your-face realism of the two main characters with the subtextual surrealism represented by the omnipresent character of the Old Man succinctly brought together all of his experimental works with his underlying penchant for simply telling a good story.
In the hands of Peter James Cirino, Artistic Director of Planet Earth Theatre, this show would seem to be a perfect vehicle. Overall, the show is reasonably well-presented and reasonably well-performed, though the usual flair for the theatrical and experimental usually associated with this group seems to be sadly missing. While nothing stands out as being overtly wrong, save for one performance, there is also nothing that really stands out overall. This is Shepard given a simple, solid presentation that depends more on the script than the production, and for some inexplicable reason, that is a disappointment.
Mr. Cirino's blocking and direction seems to be by-the-book. At no point does the production grab the audience and shake it by the proverbial collar. While, really, there's nothing wrong with that, persay, it's still disconcerting when considered against the previous, impressive body of work presented by this group.
The men in the piece, notably Eric Woods, give solid performances. Mr. Wood's portrayal of Eddie, the boozy cowboy fleeing a love gone wrong and returning to a love that should never have been, was commendable. His slow descent into drunkenness and his abrupt moments of lucidity were always true. As the ever-present Old Man, Tom Collins gave a believable performance. As Martin, an innocent bystander who becomes involved with the torrid situation, Anthony Andrews played the humor of the role in an interesting and appreciable way.
The biggest let-down of the evening, besides the unremarkable presentation, was the overly telegraphed performance of Mollie Kellogg Cirino as the poor, sweet, doomed May. The character is meant to be at once powerful and overpowered, but Ms. Cirino's presentation was too over-the-top to ever give her anything more than an air of insanity. From quaking, clutching start to wild, frenetic end, Ms. Cirino seems too crazy too early to allow for any true character movement.
David Gonzales set and lighting were perfect for the presentation, though there were two specific moments during crucial monologues near the end where the lighting was too overpowering and drew too much attention to itself.
It's rare when a theatre can give a simple, solid and straightforward production of an American classic like this, and still somehow miss something in the process, but despite Planet Earth's simple, solid and straightforward production of Fool For Love, they've inexplicably missed the mark. Whether the productions adherence to the script has betrayed flaws within, or the chemistry wasn't there, unfortunately, it seems a simple case where the parts just don't equal the whole.
Production Details:
Fool For Love by Sam Shepard
Planet Earth Theatre, Phoenix
241-1828
May 24th-June 15th, 1996
$9 General-$7 Students and Seniors
Return to AARO
Return to AARO 95-96