Fool for Love
Opening Night: October 8, 2015
Closing: December 13, 2015
Theater: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Holed up in a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert, two former lovers unpack the deep secrets and dark desires of their tangled relationship, passionately tearing each other apart. Beaten down by ill-fated love and a ruthless struggle for identity, can they ultimately live with, or without, each other?
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October 8, 2015
They never stop moving in the same circle, as one of them observes, sounding angry and doomed. Their end is evident in their beginnings, and vice versa. You know where they’re headed as well as they do. Yet as May and Eddie perform the savage, cyclical dance that is Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love,” which opened in a breathtaking production on Thursday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, you feel the gut-clutching suspense generated by a full-throttle cliffhanger. After all, odds are you’ve been on the edge of this particular cliff yourself, terrified and elated and wondering if you’re really going to jump. Love as a battlefield on which nobody wins has seldom been mapped as thrillingly as it is in Daniel Aukin’s definitive revival of this bruising drama from 1983. That’s in large part because as the inexorably coupled May and Eddie, Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell exude the sort of chemistry from which nuclear meltdowns are made.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 8, 2015
Sam Rockwell has earned a reputation for bringing a whiff of weirdness and explosive emotion to his roles. He delivers the goods — and so does costar Nina Arianda — in Broadway’s combustible revival of “Fool for Love.” In Sam Shepard’s ill-starred love story, Rockwell plays Eddie, a cowboy who’s hauling a trailer full of horses and a truckload of psychological wreckage. Arianda, a Tony winner for “Venus in Fur,” is May, Eddie’s long-estranged lover. She’s got demons of her own. Together they share history and a dark secret locking them in a neurotic, push-pull ritual. Adding a percussive beat are slamming doors that boom like thunder.
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October 1, 2015
Love hurts — quite literally, in the Manhattan Theater Club’s highly physicalized revival of Sam Shepard’s 1983 play “Fool for Love.” The production originated last year at the Williamstown Theater Festival, which accounts for the easy rapport between Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda as the battling lovers whose unbreakable bond of love and hate have made their lives a living hell. This may not be the definitive production of this iconic play, but director Daniel Aukin has done a thoroughly professional job. Shepard’s assault-and-battery love story felt a lot more immediate thirty years ago, when the writer-turned-movie-star had recently separated from his first wife to start a new relationship with Jessica Lange. At the time, Shepard talked about “the absolute hell” of falling in love, a human condition he called “terrible and impossible.” That cri de coeur infuses the play with its dual sense of desire and despair.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 8, 2015
A dusty motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert is the setting of “Fool for Love,” the atmospheric 1983 Sam Shepard drama now having its first Broadway staging, courtesy of the Manhattan Theatre Club. The 75-minute play, directed here by Daniel Aukin (“Bad Jews” and “The Fortress of Solitude”), arrives after a lauded production last summer in Williamstown. It’s just opened at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.As in Williamstown, Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda are back, as fiery ex-lovers. You can almost hear Rockwell’s Eddie whisper “I just can’t quit you” to Arianda’s May when he storms into the room where she’s been languishing. Eddie admits his burning love for her shortly thereafter, insisting there are few women he’d drive thousands of miles just to see.
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October 8, 2015
Since her star-making turn in 2010’s “Venus in Fur,” Nina Arianda has established a reputation for being irresistibly sexy on stage. Emotional intensity and comic agility only burnish her palpable charisma, leading critics (present one included) to gush about Arianda’s hotness factor. So it’s a welcome shock to see the actor stripped of all that allure in the opening tableau of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love,” in which Arianda plays bucking bronco to Sam Rockwell’s dusty cowpoke. Slumped on a motel bed in unflattering, baggy clothes, head slung low, this is Arianda as a broken doll, as trashed as the grubby room around her. She may spring to life with a furious attack and eventually pour herself into a little red number, but Arianda’s May is not the glamor fest one expects.
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