Fool For Love

Entertainment
The Sunday Express, February 26, 1989
Intense, funny Fool for Love teeters on passion's ragged edge
By Martha Muzychka

American playwright Sam Shepard is known for focusing on the dark side of human nature, his plays seething with barely suppressed violence and curdling the human spirit with overwhelming despair.

Fool for Love (1984) is typical Shepard drama, and the new Elysian Theatre production is relentless in both its emotional intensity and physical tension, which is not surprising, given the content.

A man and a woman meet in a motel, their past haunting them and hunting them down. The woman has tried to escape, but the two are drawn and kept together by their shared secret -- much like the two feet of a geometry compass that must follow one another in an endless dance. In this case, the dance is interrupted by two outsiders, whose presence forces the other two to break apart.

Ed Martin's direction is true to form with his trademark tableau opening, his choreographed violence and the cast's explosive emotional outbursts. The silence in the opening sequence was much too long, serving as an irritation instead of heightening the tension. One had the feeling that someone somewhere had missed a cue or forgotten a line, rather than waited out an important pause.

But once underway, the play moved at breakneck speed, bouncing from one emotional high to another, leaving little room for significant development of tension and terror. With the unfortunate evenness in dramatic tension (imagine leaving an oven on broil for 80 minutes), the audience was unable to appreciate the shifts in the characters' emotional climates until it was all over.

When the audience is first introduced to the characters, there is a sense that resignation and despair are permanent emotional fixtures. May (Marianne Moroney) is almost catatonic in her obsession for Eddie (Brian Downey). She swings from love and hate with a disturbing regularity, and her indecision is frustrating. There isn't a sense that May is truly torn between having what she wants and coping with the guilt of her illicit lust.

As the story unfolds, we see that the Eddie and May are replaying their parents' own patterns in love, one obsessive, the other compulsive. As Eddie, Downey is well able to manipulate the currents swirling around him and May, and when he latches onto Mays' new beau, Martin (Brian Smegal), Downey refused to let go.

This is a role tailor-made for Downey, whose expressiveness is a sheer pleasure to watch (despite the burden of the rest of the play). Not since Ed Bonia-Coombs, the zealous wingnut from The Adventures of Fautus Bidgood, has Downey been so magnetic and entertaining, even if Eddie is the last person you'd want to encounter in a hotel room.

Smegal is well-cast, his amiable face reflecting his character's slow, possibly naive incomprehension that people with such complicated emotions could exist, much less draw him into their hopeless lives. Marianne Moroney was harder to like, partly because she seemed to be overacting at points, and partly because her character is not as appealing as the others.

The mystery player in the set of four characters is "Old Man," who sits and watches, sipping whisky and interjecting occasional slivers of wisdom. Michael Chiasson is faced with a limited role, but his contributions are important to the resolution and (mis)understanding with which the play ends.

Fool for Love is as funny, unsettling, and provocative, for Shepard forces his audience to confront the ragged edge between passion and reason.

Fool for Love continues at the LSPU Hall until March 5. Curtain time is 8:30 p.m.