Fool for Love (Williamstown)
Opening Night: July 23, 2014
Closing: August 2, 2014
Theater: Williamstown Theatre Festival
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? Led by director Daniel Aukin, Williamstown veteran and enigmatic film star Sam Rockwell and 2012 Tony Award winner Nina Arianda bring an explosive intensity to Sam Shepard’s landmark myth of the new Wild West.
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July 27, 2014
Playwright Sam Shepard says that his own experience of being in love inspired the aptly titled Fool for Love, now on the Nikos Stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. He wrote: “”[Falling in love is] such a dumbfounding experience. In one way you wouldn’t trade it for the world. In another way it’s absolute hell. In the play May and Eddie (Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell) are both trapped, dumbfounded, in their own mutual hell of love. Their relationship hit the rocks ages ago, yet something still binds them together. This passion is at the core of Shepard’s raw and emotion-drenched drama. Like watching a catastrophic storm destroy the foundations of our lives, we watch the two lovers cling to each other like life rafts even as they try to flee from the tumultuous waters of their own unpredictable relationship.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 28, 2014
While its visitors are mostly city slickers looking for some time away, the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Nikos Stage is offering a slice of the nit and grit of what remains of the American west in its exciting and impeccable production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, which plays through August 2nd. Director Daniel Aukin’s production is remarkable in its ability to capture the soul and spirt of Shepard’s work, which depicts a contemporary culture greatly influenced by its past and characters seemingly trapped in a world where people still yearn to be cowboys, women demand independence but don’t mind being rescued, and men hold their emotions so tightly that communication is virtually impossible. It’s in to just such a place that Shepard deposits his audience, a seedy motel somewhere in the vast Mojave desert, where interpersonal relationships and family secrets will boil over for approximately 85 minutes. Aukin certainly knows his way around a Shepard, having not too long ago directed one of the playwright’s newest plays, Heartless at New York’s Signature Theatre Center.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 28, 2014
When May and Eddie (Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell) get together in Fool for Love after years apart, decades of pent up emotion explode on the Nikos Stage of the Williamstown Theatre Festival. In this concise 75 minute play, the pair discovers they are half-siblings. They have a common father (Gordon Joseph Weiss) – who sits stage left throughout the proceedings reacting to their story, interjecting comments and bounding onto the set at one point to rant at the pair. Unwittingly, the clueless half brother and sister first met and played around in high school, then went on to develop a full blown relationship that hit the rocks ages ago, yet something still binds them together. This passion is at the core of Shepard’s raw and emotion-drenched drama. Like watching a catastrophic storm destroy the foundations of people’s lives, we watch the two lovers as they both cling to each other like life rafts even as they try to flee from the tumultuous waters of their own unpredictable relationship.
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July 28, 2014
Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell must have gotten to know each other real well, real fast this summer. If their impossible mission was to achieve an instant, unfathomable intimacy, that assignment has been more than fulfilled in Daniel Aukin’s knockout production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, which runs through Saturday at the Williamstown Theater Festival here. Playing a man and a woman who spend their lives running away from, and straight toward, each other in this 75-minute, 31-year-old drama, Mr. Rockwell and Ms. Arianda project a mutual understanding that stings like a cut that won’t scab. Such dangerous awareness is found only among members of the same mortal family or longtime lovers. Imagine what it means if, like May and Eddie in Fool, you happen to be both. Ms. Arianda and Mr. Rockwell were cast in their roles barely a month ago, after the show’s original stars, Lauren Ambrose and Chris Pine, dropped out. Sometimes urgency is the soul of theater, and perhaps limited rehearsal time worked to the advantage of a play that is, as the script dictates, to be “performed relentlessly without a break.”
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