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Fool for Love is the love tragedy of Eddie and May: the gutless guilt and shame that tear them apart and the ill-fated connection that bind them together. When Eddie and May fell in love, they had no idea how a father’s double life would turn true love into tragedy. Eddie, escaping from his affair with “the countess”, returns to reclaim his love and cowboy life. He finds the broken, ruthless pieces of his girl, May, in a cheap motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert trying to move on with the harsh realities of her situation. While ...Read More
Fool for Love is the love tragedy of Eddie and May: the gutless guilt and shame that tear them apart and the ill-fated connection that bind them together. When Eddie and May fell in love, they had no idea how a father’s double life would turn true love into tragedy. Eddie, escaping from his affair with “the countess”, returns to reclaim his love and cowboy life. He finds the broken, ruthless pieces of his girl, May, in a cheap motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert trying to move on with the harsh realities of her situation. While May’s new boyfriend, Martin, gets caught in the middle, we witness ghosts of the past intertwine with the present to bring the story full circle. The characters sort through the emotional tumult of their lives in a power struggle where identity is vague, time is cyclical, and memories are idealized and altered to suit the needs of the dreamer.
Shepard wrote Fool for Love shortly after breaking up with his wife O-Lan to be with Jessica Lange. In a letter to his friend and virtuoso collaborator, Joe Chaikin, Shepard described his play, Fool for Love as "the outcome of all this tumultuous feeling I've been going through this past year…it's a very emotional play and in some ways embarrassing for me to witness but somehow necessary at the same time." Few writers manage to elevate higher than the sensationalism of confessional drama, but Shepard's allegory for his own loss and love rises above and provides us with an intensely powerful personal drama that draws us in with its manic depiction of ill-fated love.
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