STAGE: 'FOOL FOR LOVE,' SAM SHEPARD WESTERN
By FRANK RICH
Published: May 27, 1983, Friday
NO one knows better than Sam Shepard that the true American West is gone forever, but there may be no writer alive more gifted at reinventing it out of pure literary air. Like so many Shepard plays, ''Fool for Love,'' at the Circle Repertory Company, is a western for our time. We watch a pair of figurative gunslingers fight to the finish - not with bullets, but with piercing words that give ballast to the weight of a nation's buried dreams.
As theater, ''Fool for Love'' could be called an indoor rodeo. The setting is a present-day motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, where, for 90 minutes, May (Kathy Baker) and Eddie (Ed Harris) constantly batter one another against the walls. May and Eddie have been lovers for 15 years; they may even, like the fratricidal antagonists of ''True West,'' be siblings. But May has had it: she'd now like nothing more than to ''buffalo'' Eddie by stabbing him in the middle of a passionate kiss.
Eddie is some sort of rancher, complete with saddle, rifle and lasso. Yet there's no more range - Marlboro men ride only on television - and he lives in a tin trailer. The motel room is May's most recent home. With its soiled green walls and a window facing black nothingness, it looks like a jail cell; its doors slam shut with a fierce metallic clang. When Eddie uses his rope, all he can snare is a bedpost. When the two lovers want to escape, they don't mount horses for a fast getaway - they merely run to the parking lot and back.
But if the West is now reduced to this - a blank empty room with an unmade bed - Mr. Shepard fills that space with reveries as big as all outdoors. When the play's fighting lets up, we hear monologues resembling crackling campfire tales. The characters - who also include May's new suitor (Dennis Ludlow) and a ghostly ''old man'' (Will Marchetti) sipping Jim Beam in a rocking chair - try to find who they are and where they are. Though the West has become but a figment of the movies, Eddie contends that ''there's not a movie in this town that can match the story I can tell.''
Laced with the floating images of cattle herds, old cars and even a spectral Spencer Tracy looming in the dark, these hallucinatory stories chart the Shepard vision. His characters are ''disconnected''; they fear being ''erased''; they hope to be ''completely whole.'' In ''Fool for Love,'' each story gives us a different ''version'' of who May, Eddie and the old man are, and the stories rarely mesh in terms of facts. Yet they do cohere as an expression of the author's consciousness: as Shepard's people race verbally through the debris of the West, they search for the identities and familial roots that have disappared with the landscape of legend.
Not finding what they seek, they use their dreams as weapons, to wipe each other out. The old man, a ghostly figure who may be May and Eddie's father, tells the couple that they could be ''anybody's children'' - ''I don't recognize myself in either of you and never did.'' Eddie and May respond in kind, even as they obliterate their own shared past. ''You got me confused with someone else,'' says May to her lover, vowing never again to be suckered into one of his ''little fantasies.'' What remains of Eddie's fantastical West is ultimately destroyed, too: his few horses burn in the play's apocalyptic finale.
Mr. Shepard's conceits are arresting and funny. Eddie, in explaining his particular erotic fixation, tells May that her neck keeps ''coming up for some reason.'' The old man contends he is married to Barbara Mandrell and announces, without much fear of contradiction, that the singer's picture is hanging on an empty wall. There is a strange poignancy to May's suitor, a gentle maintenance man too lost even to dream of a self. Like a much talked-about ''countess'' of Eddie's supposed acquaintance, this sweet gentleman caller, intentionally or not, provides ''Fool for Love'' with an odd, unlikely echo of Tennessee Williams.
The production at the Circle Rep allows New York audiences to see the play in its native staging. ''Fool for Love'' has been transported here from Mr. Shepard's home base, the Magic Theater of San Francisco, complete with the original cast under the author's direction. The actors are all excellent: With utter directness, they create their own elusive yet robust world - feisty, muscular, sexually charged - and we either enter it or not.
''Fool for Love'' isn't the fullest Shepard creation one ever hopes to encounter, but, at this point in this writer's prolific 20-year career, he almost demands we see his plays as a continuum: they bleed together. In the mode of his recent work, this play has a title and beat that's more redolent of country music than rock; the theatrical terms are somewhat more realistic than outright mythic (though reality is always in the eye of the beholder). The knockabout physical humor sometimes becomes excessive both in the writing and the playing; there are also, as usual, some duller riffs that invite us to drift away.
It could be argued, perhaps, that both the glory and failing of Mr. Shepard's art is its extraordinary afterlife: His works often play more feverishly in the mind after they're over than they do while they're before us in the theater. But that's the way he is, and who would or could change him? Like the visionary pioneers who once ruled the open geography of the West, Mr. Shepard rules his vast imaginative frontier by making his own, ironclad laws. Buffaloing Eddie FOOL FOR LOVE, written and directed by Sam Shepard; sets by Andy Stacklin; costumes by Ardyss L. Golden; lighting designed by Kurt Landisman; sound by J.A. Deane; associate director, Julie Hebert; production stage manager, Suzanne Fry; lighting supervised by Mal Sturchio. The Magic Theater of San Francisco's Production presented by Circle Repertory Compa- ny, Marshall W. Mason, artistic director; Richard Frankel, managing director; B. Rodney Marriott, acting artistic director. At 99 Seventh Avenue South. May .......................................Kathy Baker Eddie .......................................Ed Harris Martin ..................................Dennis Ludlow The Old Man ............................Will Marchetti
