Compressing the endless skies of the American West into the tin-can confines of a squalid motel room, and playing like a cowboy version of “Rashomon” with just a splash of Beckett, Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” needs more than star power to redeem it. It requires visceral punch, menacing physicality, emotional exhilaration and a compelling reason for being.
As warring lovers Eddie and May, Kenny Leon and Jasmine Guy bring their considerable celebrity to director Todd Kreidler’s True Colors Theatre production, which is at the Balzer Theater at Herren’s through June 11. Leon is the most important and charismatic man in Atlanta theater today; while Guy, a former TV star returned to her hometown of Atlanta, is frequently in demand for her acting, choreographic and directing chops. Yet as an onstage couple, they don’t bring much ammunition or inventiveness to Shepard’s story of curdled and claustrophobic love, which likely seemed a good bit edgier when it first appeared in 1983.
A sordid tale of last-chance romance, shotguns, tequila and scabrous language, “Fool for Love” finds Leon playing Eddie as kind of a playful, gentle giant. Even when he’s pointing a shotgun barrel at May or lassoing her to a chair, there’s an amused, jokey air to his performance that undermines the bruising and bullying. The waif-like Guy, on the other hand, is a cagey feline waiting to pounce, but Leon’s sly approach doesn’t give her much to chew on.
For his gun-slinging elegy to the epic West, Shepard glances back at Strindberg’s “The Dance of Death,” Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and even Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot,” another study of sibling anguish. (Leon knows this literature: Two years ago, he appeared on this stage in “Blood Knot,” and, in a 1993 Actor’s Express production, he portrayed Eddie opposite the late Carol Mitchell-Leon, who was his wife at the time.)
Shepard wears an experimental posture here, with his ghostly Old Man character, who stumbles at the margins of the drama, interjecting occasional commentaries and providing his version of May and Eddie’s troubled past. In truth, it’s a trick as old as the Greeks. Casting Larry C. Larson (who is quite good) as the Old Man makes sense perhaps in a metaphysical way. But if the Old Man’s patrimonial claims are taken at face value, the irony is likely to be lost on some. Rounding out the ensemble is Enoch King as May’s gentleman caller, Martin. This suitor has no idea what he is stepping into, and King makes him seem appropriately shaken and disturbed.
Like Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and Friedrich Durrenmatt’s “The Visit,” “Fool for Love” is coiled with an aura of doom and dread, of waiting for something that is inevitable and catastrophic. What’s happening outside these flimsy motel walls (designed by Kat Conley) is just as important as what’s transpiring within. Alas, this perfectly safe, solid and quite starry show never realizes its apocalyptic potential.
Theater review
“Fool for Love”
Grade: C+
8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. Through June 11. $20-$50. True Colors Theatre, Balzer Theater at Herren's, 84 Luckie St., Atlanta. 1-877-725-8849; www.ticketalternative.com; truecolorstheatre.org
Bottom line: Starry cast never quite illuminates Shepard’s challenging drama.
About the Author
