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The Law of Orbits Take Heed's Fool for Love explores the menace of hopeless love, if
you can call it that By Dave Amber Article Published Sep 22,
2005 |
Entertainment Details
Who / What:
Details:
Presented through September
24 by the Take Heed Theater Company. Call 561-868-3309.
Directed By:
Don Butler
Starring:
Howard Elfman, Niki Fridh,
Dave Hyland, and Jack Lawson
Where:
Stage West Theater on the
Lake Worth campus of Palm Beach Community College, 4200 Congress Ave., Lake
Worth, FL
Written By:
Sam Shepard
Fridh
(left), Lawson, and Hyland: You can't escape Dad.
So when does charisma and charm
switch to malevolence and menace? That's the turning point you're waiting for
when you sit down to Sam Shepard's Fool for Love. It doesn't
take long to get there. But once you do, the wave-like motion between these opposing
alliterations will continue cycling throughout the play's manifestations of
love, lust, hate, desperation and... golly... this certainly doesn't sound like
anything you'd want to go see.
But you do. The production, by the
upstart Take Heed Theater Company -- performed with skill by those who love the
stage, as Take Heed clearly does in its maiden voyage -- supports one reason we
go to see plays in the first place: to way overthink our dirty human
experience.
When it comes to Fool for Love's main characters,
Eddie and May, played by Dave Hyland and Niki Fridh, all one can say, to
bastardize Edward Albee's Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, is
"Eddie and May: sad, sad, sad." Rodeo cowboy Eddie has driven many
hours to be deposited in the bare motel room at the Mojave Motor Court, where
his love object, May, is sitting on the edge of her bed, an emotionally spent
figure, building up energy like a capacitor to prepare for the onset of crazy
storms of crazy love.
In May's motel room, the walls are
stained. The small table appears shaky, the bed looks uncomfortable, and the
window lets in floods of light from cars passing outside. May's room is every
dingy motel room on the wayside of every highway of American loneliness.
But this is home for May, at least for
now. She calls it her "house," although she keeps everything in the
bathroom, the only safe place, where glasses stored in the medicine cabinet are
ready for a tequila-fueled night of catching up, as it were. The primary
question, though, centers on what exactly is Eddie to May and May to Eddie, and
why have they been orbiting each other for 15 years? Also, who the hell is that
guy known as the Old Man, sitting stage left sipping booze from a styrofoam
cup?
For the moment, though, disregard the
Old Man and consider the orbit of Eddie and May:
Eddie: You know we're connected,
May. We'll always be connected. That was decided a long time ago.
May: Nothing was decided. You made
all that up.
For nearly four decades, Sam Shepard
has been the graceful chronicler of what we now think of as Jerry Springer
America. What's often pointy about Shepard's plays of American rootlessness,
though, is that they don't always promise the much-hoped-for positive side of
American rootlessness -- reinvention. No, there's no reinvention here in Fool, only folky
cycles of obsession. As long as May exists, it seems, Eddie will orbit her in a
totally ragged, non-Keplerian, unplanetary kind of way.
Director Don Butler focuses this
orbit well, coolly negotiating the jagged revolutions of his crossed lover
stars and drawing out the kind of performances required to make Fool for
Love a success. The actors playing Eddie and May must transcend
Shepard's textbook twang to give full range to their harsh, vulnerable
characters. Hyland and Fridh serve the occasion well. Fridh puts much passion
into her May as she oscillates from anger to seduction. Hyland, an anchor of
Mod 27, Take Heed's improv group cousin, fully draws out Eddie's unstable
mayhem while also offering unsuspected gags -- Eddie is a totally
spur-of-the-moment kind of guy -- that help round out his character's
volatility.
May and Eddie aren't the only ones
here, though. There's also Martin -- played with selfless obsequiousness by
Jack Lawson -- May's gentleman suitor, who becomes the innocent audience for
Eddie and May's destructive performances as they reconstruct their sordid
history. In the story they tell him -- which inspires a perfectly wide-eyed,
quiet performance by Lawson -- you can see how the tale told many times before
will be told many more times hence in whatever dark motel rooms await them.
Shepard's plays often dwell on the
son-and-the-father orbit. And in Fool, the Old Man, played naturally by a
richly menacing Howard Elfman, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, lingers to
spook up the place (wait, wasn't that Sam Shepard himself playing the ghost in
the awful Ethan Hawke Hamlet movie?). Is the Old Man a memory
conjured by Eddie and May, or is the entire play just the Old Man's dream?
Hmm...
Hamlet couldn't escape his father's
ghost as he walked gloomily through Denmark. So why should Eddie get off clean?
The thing about Denmark, though, is that it's just Denmark, a tiny fart of a
place (with apologies, of course, to Niels Bohr, Soren Kierkegaard, and the
proprietors of Legoland). But this is the big American West, goddamn it.
Shouldn't you be able to run away from your father's ghost if you have
thousands of square miles of free territory to roam? Clearly not. There is no
space large enough to escape from Dad.
"I'm not leaving," Eddie
keeps saying with slippery reassurance from beginning to end. But Eddie, May,
and the rest of us know better. Fool for Love is all about
leaving amid the promise, or threat, of staying. Take your pick of
interpretation. When the leaving happens, however, you might assume these
critters will be back for more. It may be a different motel room along a
different highway, but they'll be back. Funny how orbits are like that.