Playwright Sam Shepard opens the script for his 1983 Fool for Love with a thick paragraph of setting direction, describing details as small as just how much the bathroom door should be ajar. But his first direction is his most important: “This play is to be performed relentlessly, without a break.”
With their first staging, brand new Portland theater company Tour de Force Productions takes some inventive liberties with Shepard’s mise-en-scène, but his direction about relentlessness they fervently obey.
In the space of about 70 unsparing minutes, May (Meghan Daaboul) and Eddie (Max Bernsohn) run deep into a darkening montage of painful relationships, conflicted or damaged individuals, and the multigenerational weight of cruel choices.
We simply cannot help but recall this duo’s construction of Stanley and Blanche in Imago Theatre’s January production of Streetcar Named Desire. The fire present there is here. It’s not surprising that Daaboul launched her new company with the already-tested, successfully-scintillating onstage dynamic she shares with Bernsohn.
As May and Eddie—cramped into a cruddy motel room and circling one other like two scorpions in a jar—these two experienced players do not let up. As we meet them—and they curse one another—an old man (David Heath) is also with them, sitting in shadow by the edge of the stage, drinking whiskey.
May lives a barren existence in a solitary motel room; Eddie keeps his tin house-trailer next door. They’ve been lovers for many years, little of it pleasant. She loves him with an intensity born of years of damage, shrieking “don’t go!” as Eddie heads for the door. But just as quickly she recites long, imagined scenarios: plans to kill him with a series of knives.
Eddie is no less primitive. He’s a rodeo cowboy or a stuntman, circulating among western rodeos—always returning to May smelling of horses and other women, declaring to her his immutable love. He will never leave her. We know the type.
So far, so bad. Through Shepard’s surgically precise writing we look into the souls of a love-starved, desperate woman and the archetype of the brutal drifter. The shadowy man, sipping whiskey, engages them in brief conversations. Is he real? Is he just in their memory? In a shift of plot—that completely changes the story’s direction—the old man suddenly cracks open the key to this painful, struggling pair.
Tour de Force's staging—while not exactly what Shepard called for—is creative. Working within 21Ten Theatre’s tiny black box venue, they've projected a series of photographs on a screen behind the action, fleshing out setting and background.
We enter Shepard's Fool for Love asking: Who is the real fool for love?” And end by asking ourselves “Who isn’t?”
Tour De Force presents Fool for Love at 21Ten Theatre through June 22, $25, tickets here, tourdeforce-productions.com
