Every once in a while, a critic simply knows where her review will end up going only a few minutes into a show. Facility Theatre’s production of Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love was one such time for me. Before the opening scene was five minutes in, before the lead female, May, had uttered a word, before there had even been a beat change, I strongly sensed that I already knew everything I needed to know, and I was proved right by the rest of the evening. When actors are this strong, this utterly focused in their roles, and when the direction clearly is playing to their strengths and getting everything possible from them, the only thing that can hurt a production is a weak script and, as mentioned earlier, this is a Sam Shepard play. There isn’t a weak phrase in it.
The story here is deceptively (and I do mean deceptively) simple: John Byrnes’ Eddie has traveled over 2000 miles to find his missing love, May, played by Tiffany Bedwell. It’s clear from the opening tableau, with him in a “Thinker” pose on a windowsill and her sprawled across the bed, head dangling over the side, that the relationship being revisited here is at best a complicated one, and during the course of the play we will discover just how complicated it truly is. But it is in that opening scene when, wordless, she literally crawls up his body, wraps herself around him and refuses to let go, that we see how this play is going to work. It requires its actors to be at the very top of their physical games; body language and movement say almost as much as words here. There are long scenes when one character or another is onstage and silently going about some business while others carry on conversation, but no one here is ever unfocused, and character development continues in these silences.
As the main pair simmer and parry back and forth, we also meet the other two characters in this play: a young man and an old man. The young man, Martin, was invited by May before she knew Eddie was coming. He is her date tonight; Eddie makes a big deal of the fact that she describes him as “the man that is coming,” arguing that, if he meant anything to her, she’d call him “the guy that is coming,” creating a wonderfully ironic context in which it is not good to be seen as worthy to be labeled a “man.” (Eddie is pretty shrewd.) The old man isn’t really there at all: he is the psychological remnant of someone Eddie knew, a dream figure. (To say more is to give away some of the play’s secrets.)
Kurt Boetcher’s set design, creating a seedy motel room in a seedy place to fill with Kotryna Hiko’s props (I don’t think I’ve ever seen an uglier kitchen table or a less stable-looking bed; they are perfect!), invites director Zeljko Djukic to have some blocking fun. Sending May into the bathroom, for example, isn’t as simple as opening a door; she has to go through a walk-in closet to get to it. It’s a crazy design when you consider it, but why not? It makes for some wonderful momentary delays as May vanishes into the back and then reappears where she needs to be, a visual treat as well as a palate-cleanser. And Jeffrey Levin’s sound design not only provides perfect effects, but he creates a soundtrack perfect for the dreamscape that this play often becomes.
Speaking of Djukic, the director here works intricately with the two main actors to craft performances that are among the best I’ve seen in quite a while, and they have to be: Shepard does them no favors with a script that calls for them to be all over the map emotionally, sometimes changing at the drop of a hat. But that is what love does: it makes all of us fools (not the least of which is poor Martin—Darren Hill—who came for a date and instead is forced to stand there and witness Eddie and May and the unsunny day). As to the old man (Henry Bolzon), he gets an angry, showy scene near the play’s end, belying the identity he has forged for himself as the quietly cynical presence in the background.
But it is Bedwell (especially) and Byrnes whose creations form the indelible center of this play. Every move they make, every word from their mouths, feels like truth, and they are both among the most physical performers you’ll want to see. Their characters’ love/hate relationship has its origins in dark secrets, but each of them is more than willing to ignore the darkness to satisfy the lust that derives from it. By the time Bedwell sheds real tears onstage, it just seems a natural extension of everything else she’s done. This is a powerful play made more powerful by the work of two powerful performers.
Fool For Love is now playing at the Chopin Theatre (presented by Facility Theatre), 1543 W. Division St, until November 12. Tickets are available from Facility Theatre Company. Find more information about current plays on our Current Shows page and at theatreinchicago.com.
