Fool for Love- By Sam Shepard
- Directed by Kasi Campbell
- Produced by Spooky Action Theater
- Reviewed by Tim Treanor
With this production of Fool for Love, Spooky Action Theater establishes itself beyond question as a significant force in Washington theater. The Takoma Park company continues to operate in an intimate space and under a modest budget, but everything else about this production is big-league, and big-time.
Fool for Love, Shepard’s best play, is itself a celebration of bigness, of the huge, ungovernable, DNA-driven passions which make men and women helpless before their animal instincts. Half-siblings Eddie (Stewart Walker) and May (Halsey Varady) love each other with the same force which compels salmon to swim upstream, and hate each other and themselves because of it. Eddie has wandered off from the miserable tin trailer that served as their home to pursue a mysterious woman known only as “the Countess”, and May, abandoned, eventually wanders down to an equally miserable motel room on the edge of the Mojave desert. Now, Eddie is back, and the whole Mojave is not large enough to contain all the lust, passion and tragedy which ensues.
Their father (Manolo Santalla), a bigamist, was as bewildered by his carnal instincts as his son is by his own. In a riveting passage near the end of the play, Eddie describes his father at the mercy of his feelings toward May’s mother, weeping in bewilderment. He wants to be a good husband and father, but he is no more capable of it than Eddie, years later, is of establishing a stable relationship.
It is Shepard’s brilliant touch that the father is in the room to hear Eddie’s story. It is Campbell’s brilliant touch that he is in the room for the whole of the play, in the cabin of a truck which has leapt through the wall of a building. (“That’s the most realistic mannequin I’ve ever seen,” the person behind me said, looking at Santalla, motionless in the truck before the play began. “I would have thought it was an actor, except he isn’t breathing.”) It is one of a hundred superb decisions on Campbell’s part, including superbly choreographed movement (Robb Hunter does the fight choreography), and brilliant light and sound (credit Ayun Fredorcha and Matt Rowe, respectively).
The most important inspiration, of course, is casting. Walker, hollow-eyed and unshaven, is a superb howling victim, perfectly matched with Verady, who radiates sexuality like a star radiates heat. James Gange, who plays a man seeking to date May, provides the perfect counterpoint to all this hugeness: he is a small man, whose only objective is to take May to the movies. His tiny movements and gestures – wonderfully, he tries to follow the action taking place behind him without moving his head – correspond perfectly with the huge drama around him. And Santalla, as previously indicated, is superb.
One final note: Spooky Action, which in the fairly recent past had audiences smaller than the cast, needed to find extra chairs for last Sunday’s performance. The bad days are gone, perhaps forever. Congratulations to Spooky Action, for hanging in against all challenges and for becoming a first-class theater. And congratulations to you, for hanging in with Spooky Action, and for supporting all small theaters, everywhere.
- Running Time:1:10, without intermission
- When: Through March 9.Thursdays through Saturdays at 9, and Sundays at 2.
- Where: Black Box Theatre, Montgomery College, Takoma Park, MD – corner of Philadelphia and Chicago Avenues.
- Tickets: $10. Students at the door, $5. Call 1.800.494.TIXS or write http://www.spookyaction.org/.
