In Sam Shepard's “Fool for Love,” two formidable foes face off in a motel at the edge of the Mojave Desert. On-again, off-again lovers May and Eddie may not draw blood, but they always shoot for the heart.
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“Fool for Love”
New Village Arts Theatre
When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays; 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; through Oct. 26
Where: 2787 B State St., Carlsbad
Tickets: $25-$30
Phone: (760) 433-3245
Online: newvillagearts.org
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Theirs is the ultimate love-hate relationship, the stuff of Greek tragedy. Kristianne Kurner and Joshua Everett Johnson play out the brutal power struggle between the ill-fated couple in New Village Arts' intense production of Shepard's modern Western. Their blistering emotions seem to peel the paint right off the walls of New Village's shabby motel room set.
Eddie and May need each other, yet their forbidden love is doomed from the start. While Eddie can't seem to stay away from May – he just drove thousands of miles to track her down and take her back home to a trailer in Wyoming – he can't seem to stay, either. The last time they went through this cycle of love and abandonment, they tried to live out Eddie's cowboy fantasy before he ditched her for another woman.
As the play opens, May has finally become comfortable in her independence. She has a job and a date. But it's a tenuous confidence – within minutes, she desperately clings to Eddie then pushes him away and pounds on his chest. He tells her he's not going anywhere, then promptly says he's leaving. During the course of the play, he walks out several times, only to return moments later as if nothing has happened.
Johnson and Kurner are finely matched as the sparring lovers. Though Johnson doesn't carry the rugged look or imposing physical presence of a Marlboro Man, he is convincingly menacing and forceful as Eddie. “You'll never escape me,” he says to May, as both a threat and a simple statement of fact. The two are fated to repeat the cycle until they are destroyed in their noxious gaming.
Kurner taps into May's deep pain, vulnerability and resolute strength. Her boiling emotions explode onto the stage with ferocity, amid violence, gritted teeth, stabbing eyes and passionate kisses. “You're like a disease to me,” she says, equally tormented by his presence as she is by his absence.
Director Dana Case has these adversaries stalk each other like prey. She has a feel for the rhythm of their deadly dance, punctuated by slamming doors, stamping feet and pounding fists.
Their complicated history unspools before two witnesses – May's date for the evening (Greg Wittman, appropriately timid as the hapless spectator) and an Old Man (Jack Missett, a grizzled cowboy, funny and surreal). A ghostly figure from the past haunting from the sidelines, The Old Man exists only in their minds, a reminder of the far-reaching, lasting effects of his double life.
Adam Brick's sound design breathes life to the off-stage action and includes Merle Haggard's “Wake Up” and Johnny Cash's “Remember Me (I'm the One Who Loves You)” to underscore Shepard's ruptured Western motif. Ashley Jenks' lighting deftly shifts mood and helps delineate fantasy and reality.
Though perhaps shocking when it premiered in 1983, contemporary audiences may be inured to depictions of the kind of brutal, destructive love shared by Eddie and May. Still, New Village Arts' production of “Fool for Love” proves the play remains a powerful, engaging drama.
Jennifer Chung Klam is a San Diego theater critic.
