"Play it again, Sam Shepard"
Kamal Al-Solaylee

Sam Shepard, the existential cowboy of American theatre, is back in the saddle and hitting the town. Admittedly, he's riding an old horse -- Fool for Love from 1983 -- but with Ted Dykstra in the director's chair and Megan Follows and Stuart Hughes in the lead, this Canadian welcome wagon is injecting new life into the playwright and his mode of transportation. So before we get all tangled in the nitty-gritty of this Soulpepper production, which opened Wednesday, let me get one sophisticated critical comment out of the way: Howdy, partners.

You can argue that this American-Canadian joint effort is just another connection in a play that relentlessly seeks to connect male and female, fantasy and reality, truth and lies. The two lovers who meet again (or more accurately, reconnect) in an old motel in the Mojave Desert are two halves that got split due to social and biological reasons. May (Follows) is trying desperately to escape the all-consuming but noncommittal desires of Eddie (Hughes), but she can't or doesn't seem all that willing to. "You know we're connected, May. We'll always be connected. That was decided a long time ago," Eddie tells May as both keep hitting the physical and metaphorical walls of their motel room. The walls there don't have ears but are amplified -- nice sound design by John Gzowski -- to make each hit thunderously resonant. The incestuous nature of May and Eddie's relationship only affirms their entrapment within these No Exit - like walls.

Eddie's craving for connection with May is initially at odds with his wild-frontier, lonesome spirit -- complete with cowboy boots, lassos aplenty and a horse trailer parked outside the motel. But like the Marlboro Man, to whom May sarcastically compares him, Eddie is living a macho fantasy that, in contemporary America, only exists on billboards and in westerns.

Its last vestige is the dramatic-convention-breaking character of the Old Man (Frank Moore in a stunning performance), whose existence at the periphery of the stage and the story belies his importance to the lives of those front and centre. If the cowboy character is a case of reality turning to myth, the Old Man, as envisioned stylistically by Shepard, is mythology given a realistic twist. Without labouring the point, Dykstra's assured direction allows both worlds to co-exist and inform each other, bringing Shepard's undisciplined theatricality into full focus.

What sets Fool for Love apart from Shepard's earlier work is the space (emotional, physical and psychological) he has given to May. ("I wanted to try to take this leap into a female character, which I had never really done," Shepard said at the time.) If there's one thing to be said about Follows, it's that this petite actor can fill up large theatrical spaces or, as her TV career proves, revert to a smaller, quieter mode of performance. The May that Follows sustains for the play's 75-minute run draws on both ends of the acting game. She is gentle, even helpless, one minute and a kick-ass fighter the next. Throughout, Follows gives a performance of great emotional intelligence and considerable physical dexterity as well. You can feel that sexual torrent inside her that makes her a fool for love.

The same sexual fire also burns, if less palpably and consistently, in Hughes, a founding member of Soulpepper whose turn in last year's double bill of The Dumb Waiter and The Zoo Story was one of the season's highlights. Hughes and Follows are, incidentally, real-life partners who have been engaged for a number of years now, so any unevenness in the performances is not a case of missing chemistry. Rather, Hughes has not yet found what makes his character's emotional and sexual pleading so significant in a man who also guards his autonomy so jealously. No doubt, his performance of Eddie -- which itself is a performance of the wild cowboy of western legend -- will be refined as the run continues. Still, it's as the bad boy mothers have warned their daughters about for centuries that he excels here. One look at him and you know that Martin, the hapless suitor who has come to take May to the movies (amiably and effectively played by Kevin Bundy), doesn't stand a ghost of a chance.

Finally, this production marks the welcome return of Follows to the Toronto stage, but it's also notable for giving us a chance to re-experience the work of Shepard, rarely produced professionally in our theatres. Here's hoping Soulpepper, which moves into year-long programming in 2006, will present more of his (and other contemporary American playwrights') works in their playbills. While America needs to understand the world around it better and with less jingoism, the world also needs to understand it, and Shepard's plays, with their dissection of the American Dream and recent mythology, are one way of doing just that.

Source: The Globe and Mail

National Post - August 20, 2005

"Fool For Love"
Robert Cushman

The character of May in Sam Shepard's 1983 play, Fool for Love, is generally reckoned to be his first fully drawn female character. I'd go further than that. All the characters in this piece have more life in them than any in his previous works. It was the best play Shepard had written up to that time, and I have yet to see another of his to match it. Previously he had put down supposedly mythic American figures -- cowboys, gamblers, rock 'n' rollers -- and let them stew in their own jargon. The results were static, and very boring. In Fool for Love there is action and there are tightly coiled conflicts, and the language, because it carries that tension, sings.

Cowboys. For some reason, of which the likeliest is sheer coincidence, they are all over our stages, all of them figures who in some sense are working the rodeos, some in triumph, others in desperation. The leading man of Annie Get Your Gun peers amiably if nervously from beneath his ten-gallon hat and suggests that once upon a time you could, if you were the star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, get a girl with a gun. The heroes of Bus Stop, at the Shaw Festival, and of Fool for Love, newly revived by Soulpepper, have a harder time of it, one that seems to get worse with the years. Bo, in Bus Stop, from the 1950s, has to be taught how to treat a lady, but at least his job still makes sense. He has a ranch and it pays. Eddie, in Fool for Love, is an anachronism and knows it. Like Bo, though in rather different circumstances, he feels himself predestined to a certain woman, nd he has some kind of future to offer her. Bo's Cherie, being '50s Broadway, was just naturally bound to accept it. May, 1980s off-Broadway, may well feel the same, but her destiny remains open to question. As does Eddie's.

Really, he's in two kinds of myth. There's the obvious western one, and there's also one that seems to go back to the Greeks. Its nature is only revealed late in the play, and Fool for Love is not yet enough of a classic for a critic to feel happy about giving away the ending. Anyway, Eddie and May have a long-time on-and-off relationship that is clearly unbreakable and that both are trying to break, Eddie in the way he behaves, May in the way she reacts. Eddie has been away a long while and now he's come back to where he left her, which happens to be a motel room in the Mojave Desert. Steve Lucas's striking set reduces this to its bare essentials, which are very bare indeed. Ted Dykstra's exciting production has them bouncing literally and audibly off the walls. Every crash, every door slam reverberates, courtesy of John Gzowski's sound design, as if the characters were in an emotional squash court.

The game has a spectator. Quietly and rather contemptuously at the side of the stage sits an Old Man, who comes from a different dimension but is taken entirely for granted. He represents a heroic past that may not have existed but that still exhausts all Eddie's efforts to live up to it. He also knows crucial things, about both of them. Eddie and May, naturally, are jealous of one another. She suspects him of being with a presumably rich woman called the Countess, who has indeed followed him here, though the nearest she gets to putting in a personal appearance is when the headlights of her car are seen shining from outside, an effect that's both scary, especially for Eddie, and funny. May has a date with someone called Martin. He does appear, to Eddie's discomfiture; not that he proves to be any kind of threat -- he's endearingly mild-mannered, and Eddie gets rather protective toward him -- but the fact that he exists at all is an unwelcome surprise.

Stuart Hughes gives a delightful account of Eddie, who always seems to be entering with a new piece of professional gear, ostensibly for some practical purpose or just to keep in trim, but really to impress May and -- above all -- to reassure himself about his own identity. (At one point he sports two coils of rope and a revolver.) He has the physical image down perfectly, but Fate plays unkind tricks with it. Having ducked out of sight for fear of the Countess, he is forced to play a long sequence on the floor, ropelling himself around with his hands in order to conduct a conversation.

Megan Follows's Meg has less room for physical manoeuvre but more for emotional, and she goes to superb extremes of rage and tenderness. She has a tougher mind than Eddie, though it does her little good. I remember seeing Follows giving a whole string of fine performances in the great early years of the Atlantic Theatre Festival, and it's a treat to see her picking up now where she left off then.

Shepard's character successes in this play aren't confined to the heroic, or even the mock-heroic. He shows that he can also create a playable stock figure in the shape of Martin, whom Kevin Bundy makes into a very appealing slice of milquetoast. It occurs to me that though the play's title most likely refers to May it could equally apply to any of the cast -- even to the Old Man, despite his claims to have got it all together in a past life. He is, though, the least successful part of the play, not because of his casual breaking of dramatic convention -- that in itself is a triumph -- but because the news he brings is less exciting, and far less amusing, than the things we see and hear unfolding in the present. Frank Moore, unrecognizable from his smooth roles in Urinetown and Olympia, commences this one with great grizzled authority but fails to vary it. The play itself is more successful when mining the recent past than when invoking the ancestral. In the end, its murkier revelations aren't necessary. May and Eddie stand plenty tall without them.

Source: National Post

TorontoStage.com - August 4, 2005

"No Way Out"
Steven Berketo

"You're like a disease to me," complains May (Megan Follows) in one of the many tense moments of Sam Shepard's Fool For Love.

"You know we're connected. Maybe we'll always be connected," asserts Eddie (Stuart Hughes) as yet another lover's quarrel hits an apex.

Make no mistake--this couple is perpetually screwed!

Sam Shepard's sexually charged opus takes place in a shabby motel on the barren edge of the Mojave Desert where the doomed lovers battle for absolute powers in their love-hate relationship that's endured 15 years. Passion and anger ranges into the wee hours until an unspoken secret behind their attraction.

Add in an unknowing small town simpleton (Kevin Bundy) to stir feelings of jealousy and a ghostly paterfamilias presence (Frank Moore) and you have the makings of a solid one-two punch story.

Stuart Hughes' Eddie is distasteful and gritty while proving the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. The actor's ability to spike the character with obvious control issues works well. But the key to Eddie is Hughes' unwillingness to portray the character as an inherent bad seed, which keeps the audience glued to him from start to finish.

Sizing up Megan Follows presents an extreme challenge in that the general population is used to seeing her with close-ups as a result of her film and TV endeavours. We simply never get to see her enough on stage. However, she's the most refreshing look to this year's Soulpepper line-up and looks solid in front of a live audience. For some reason you find yourself routing for Follows' May more than Hughes' Eddie.

The production works on a couple of levels thanks to Ted Dykstra's wise choices. In terms of set design, he opts for an unsightly and somewhat claustrophobic environment equipped with echo chamber effects to make the play feel like a prison. Furthermore, his gut-wrenching style of directing allows a smidgen of comedy to breathe from the script but not enough to break the tension of the piece.

Sam Shepard is one of those playwrights that you either adore immensely and keep a picture of him at your bedside or ass on completely in favour of a root canal. Fool For Love by no means celebrates relationships; the play deconstructs them to expose the filth that often propels it.

Source: TorontoStage.com

Toronto Star - August 11, 2005

"Follows Burns Up The Stage"
Richard Ouzounian

Make no mistake there's a hell of an actress in town.

Megan Follows makes her much-anticipated return to the Toronto stage in Sam Shepard's Fool For Love, which opened last night at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre.

To watch Follows swagger across the stylized confines of Steve Lucas's motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert is to witness desire and desperation struggling to exist in the same tormented body.

She plays May, a woman who starts the show in a near state of catatonia, unable to even lift her head to look in the face of her on-again-off-again lover of 15 years.

But by the time this 75-minute joyride through the outskirts of hell is over, we've seen her grow in stature to the point where she seems capable of taking on anyone or anything that crosses her path.

Dressed in red, framed by the blazing yellow light from a bathroom door, Follows is every woman who has ever been willing to lose herself in the name of love.

Shepard's play is an amazing piece of work; it revels in the mythmaking of the American West while debunking it at the same time.

Stuart Hughes plays Eddie, May's partner, with the bowlegged lope and aw-shucks grin of every cowboy you've ever seen. At first, he seems all externals - a grinning good ol' boy without two thoughts to rub together. He's got the hat, he's got the boots; hell, he's even got the lasso.

But outside this motel room, there's no wide and glorious range, just a baking desert and a small-time horse trailer. And as we come to see the limits of his world, Hughes slowly takes us inside the real man, with all his emptiness and fear quivering just beneath the surface.

The heroes are dead, but their archetypes remain. That's what The Old Man tells us, as he sits in a corner, guzzling booze and dispensing memories. Frank Moore nails this one neatly, skirting the edges of caricature to eventually zero in on another hollow soul.

Shepard cleverly keeps us in the dark for a while as to the true nature of May and Eddie's relationship. It's been going on for a long time and it's obviously had its highs and lows, but May is trying to run away from it and Eddie has tracked her down, in a desert that's every bit as metaphorical as it is literal.

From the very start, the two of them drop hints as to what really happened between them. "I'll believe the truth," says May. "It's less confusing."

But that truth is a long time in coming. It takes some knock- down, drag-out fights between the two (expertly staged by John Stead) and a certain amount of liquor consumed all around before we finally get down to the heart of the matter Eddie is May's half- brother, both of them the children of The Old Man who sits on the periphery and remembers.

Shepard's attitude towards this relationship is non-judgmental, placing it somewhere in-between a classic Greek tragedy and the kind of soap opera you'd see on Jerry Springer. But the outside world's discovery of their love resulted in a horrible act of violence that May and Eddie have kept repressed all these years.

The final resolution offers up the kind of off-stage immolation Euripides would have loved, while the on-stage action leans towards the stoic suffering of a John Ford Western. Truly, Shepard's work is pitched half-way between the two.

Ted Dykstra's production is basically a smart one, knowing how to keep the emotion real while allowing it to fill a bigger symbolic canvas. He tips his hand too far by encouraging sound designer John Gzowski to magnify every piece of physical violence with reverb. We get the point it's larger than life. No need to drive it home.

Apart from that, things are just fine, with Hughes playing on his reserves of sexuality and charm, but turning brutal when needed, while Moore offers us wit and, eventually, pain.

Kevin Bundy is appropriately clueless and sweet as the innocent suitor of May whose arrival triggers the whole evening.

But in the end, it's Megan Follows you'll remember the best. When Kevin Lamotte's lighting fills the motel window with a splendid blaze to end the proceedings, he seems to be paying tribute to the woman who brought the same kind of incandescence to the play that went before.

Source: Toronto Star