[NEohioPAL] Review of "Fool For Love" at convergence-continuum

[Bob Abelman]

con-con's 'Fool For Love' provides the drama but lacks the danger

 

Bob Abelman

News-Herald, Morning Journal, Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times,

Geauga Times Courier

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

This review will appear in the News-Herald on 12/6/13

 

 

A few years ago, The New Yorker magazine ran a feature story on contemporary American playwright Sam Shepard.  Called "The Pathfinder," it noted that Shepard was "compelling to look at but hard to read." 

 

So too are his plays.  

 

"Fool For Love" - first performed in 1983 and currently on stage at convergence-continuum in Tremont - is a particularly compelling piece of slice-of-life storytelling.  It offers little more than a brief, dramatic glimpse at the turbulence that exists between two broken, rudderless people.  Violent and disturbing, this play is both hard to watch and impossible to turn away from.   

 

Set in a stark, cheap motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert in southern California, the one-act, one-hour play tells the story of troubled lovers Eddie and May.  Caught in a vicious cycle of all-encompassing attraction and visceral repulsion, the two yearn for each other with white hot passion that immediately burns itself out upon contact.  They push each other away while drawing each other near, and do so with equal energy.

 

Both Eddie and May are laconic and inarticulate, but the playwright's gift is turning their struggles to express their unbridled emotions into white trash poetry.  This is particularly true as the tequila takes effect and they get lost in the telling of how their first, ill-fated meeting became this strange, dysfunctional dance that they do in each other's company.  

 

Listening to these stories from a distant rocking chair and interjecting his color commentary on what transpired in the past is The Old Man.  He is singularly responsible for making Eddie and May the damaged people that they are today and continues to haunt their troubled, tortured souls.  

 

This is certainly an intriguing play, but what occurs on con-con's intimate Liminis Theatre performance space is a rather timid production of it.  

 

When not throbbing with passion, Shepard's words are mean to the point of menacing.  Yet, under Amy Bistok Bunce's direction, not enough of either comes through amidst otherwise fine acting. 

 

Clint Elston has a strong physical presence as the cowboy Eddie, but there is little in his manner or movement that reveals the depths of his ache for May or the extent of his irresistibility, which draws her like a moth to a flame.  Nor does he pose much of a physical threat to Martin, played nicely by Stuart Hoffman, who shows up to take May out on a date but is so terrified and intrigued by Eddie that he does not - cannot - leave the room. 

 

Similarly, Rachel Lee Kolis as May is hesitant to go to the dark, dangerous places referenced in her words and show off the qualities that make her so irresistible to Eddie that he would travel 2000 miles to be with her again.  In one scene, with Eddie laying on top of May and May not seeming to mind, Kolis kept self-consciously yanking down the rising hem of her skimpy red dress.  May most assuredly would have let the dress go adrift, perhaps encouraging it to do so, at least for a moment.  

 

All of this results in Eddie and May roaming the stage as if performing a Sam Shepard play rather than being the dangerous people in one.  

 

Robert Hawkes is a delight in all that he does as The Old Man, but he too does not appear dangerous enough for this play.  A thick thug like Eddie would not do what The Old Man says immediately when he says it if this dusty, old tumbleweed of a man did not bear some barbs upon occasion.   

 

Each player in "Fool For Love" has one hour to communicate his or her character's lifetime of pleasure/pain.  It is best that the audience leaves the theater smoldering rather than merely singed.   

 

"Fool For Love" runs through December 21 at convergence-continuum's The Liminis Theatre, 2438 Scranton Rd., in the historic Tremont neighborhood.  Tickets, which range from $10 to $15, can be purchased by calling 216-687-0074 or visiting www.convergence-continuum.org.
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