“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” says a modern Irish playwright, a proposition amply illustrated in Fool For Love (1983), Sam Shepard’s first fully-developed portrait of a male-female relationship. Moving in an instant from a kiss on the lips to a kick in the groin, Eddie and May, the ambivalent lovers and fools of the title, claim a distinctive place in Shepard’s evolving gallery of American misfits.
Before this play, Shepard’s reputation rested on a body of work that focused almost exclusively on the instability of the male psyche and the mythology of the American West. In the three “family dramas” that immediately precede Fool For Love, Shepard shows us the pathos of American men striving -- and failing -- to live up to the archetype of masculinity established in the lost days of the old frontier. Their hopeless struggle to fill the roles of romantic cowboy or valiant homesteader -- roles that have no place in the new West of shopping malls, suburbs, and interstate highways -- results in various kinds of psychic collapse. Some of these frustrated frontiersmen decline into violence, drunkenness, and sexual depravity. Others undergo an eerie mutation into different people, ending up radically transformed from their original selves. Meanwhile, their horrified families -- manless -- slide into chaos.
In Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978) and True West (1980), the primary relationships are between man and man. Divided by generation or temperament, these men regard each other from a wary distance; and yet, despite the wariness, they almost invariably dissolve into one another. In some ways, the most extraordinary feature of these dramas is exactly this process of personal alchemy, this demonstration of the fundamentally ambiguous nature of individual identity. Cast adrift on a western landscape that no longer seems like home, these men literally don’t know how or what to be. As the old West disappears, it becomes impossible for these characters simply to “be” Western men. Instead, they become the captives of myth, or identity self-consciously adopted rather than spontaneously lived.
In the context of these earlier works, Fool For Love looks like a radical departure, its most distinctive feature being that here, for the first time, the primary conflict in a Shepard play is between man and a woman. But on closer inspection, we can see that Shepard is using the erotic terrain of male-female relationships to explore many of his accustomed themes. Once again, we find ourselves in the West, this time in a motel in the Mojave Desert. Once again his male characters, Eddie the cowboy, and a drifter called the Old Man, evoke the vanishing archetypes of western masculinity. And, most importantly, the problem of self-mutability that bedevils the men in his previous work has taken hold in this play of men and women alike. In Fool For Love, what begins as a seemingly straightforward account of yet another battle in the war between the sexes will prove in the end to be an inconclusive encounter between people whose real identities remain deeply enigmatic.
The sense of enigma begins with the title. Fool For Love: at first glance, the meaning seems obvious. From the fall of Troy to the fall of Jimmy Swaggart, romantic folly has been one of the great themes of our culture, and this play appears to be offering itself as Sam Shepard’s variation -- country-style -- on a familiar old tune.
But look again. Maybe “fool” is a verb and not a noun, and maybe “fool for love” is a sentence, and an imperative sentence at that. Thus, like the Supremes ordering the heartbreaker to “Stop, in the name of love,” Shepard might also be issuing an erotic command: “in the name of love, get out there and fool somebody.” Read in this way, the title tells us that we are in for an evening, not only of romantic folly, but of romantic trickery, manipulation, and deceit as well.
A title that points simultaneously in two different directions should put us on our toes when it comes time to meet the characters and encounter the situations that make up the imaginary world of this play. Will everything there be as equivocal as the words “fool for love?”
Well, maybe. Early in the action, the Old Man, while pointing to a non-existent picture of a beautiful country singer, offers this information about his love-life: “Barbara Mandrell. That’s who that is… I am actually married to Barbara Mandrell in my mind.” And, he declares, “That’s realism.” Now there’s as clear an example of the erotic folly and romantic deception as the stage has to offer: this old fool is clearly fooling himself, for love.
But that’s assuming that what transpires in the theater of the mind is unreal. Yet the stage directions inform us that the Old Man himself “exists only in the minds of May and Eddie” -- a fact that doesn’t stop him from sitting up there on stage spinning yarns and drinking whiskey. If May and Eddie’s joint fantasy can cut such a palpable, life-like figure, then maybe the Old Man’s fancied marriage to Barbara Mandrell isn’t such a folly after all. Maybe that union is as truly consummated on the stage of his mind as is his relationship with Eddie and May on the stage in front of our eyes.
But here again, ambiguity enters the picture. Just what is his relationship with these unhappy lovers? Eddie has one version, May another, and the Old Man himself is of two minds on the matter. “Amazing thing is,” he says, after we have been led to believe in his intimate connections with both lovers, “Amazing thing is, neither one a you look a bit familiar to me.” Later on, he will reverse himself, as he stakes out a claim on Eddie that could hardly be more profound. But between the estrangement and the bondedness lies the ambiguous heart of the play.
And what is the relationship between the lovers themselves? Since their first meeting in high school, they have been apart more often than they have been together. From one perspective, then, they’re virtual strangers, people whose lives have been led largely in one another’s absence. But no matter how often they have parted, some compulsion, some unbreakable connection has drawn them together again. And so, from a different angle of vision, they are the deepest familiars -- almost in the sense in which that term is used in witchcraft: spirits held captive by the web of magic. For Eddie and May, that web is woven by imagination, by the myths they make about one another, by the ways they fool for love.
“I thought you were supposed to be a fantasist,” the Old Man tells Eddie at the beginning of the play, an account of his character emphatically endorsed by May. When, for example, Eddie tells May that “we’re connected… We’ll always be connected. That was decided a long time ago,” May’s response is unequivocal: “Nothing was decided: You made all that up.” And after Eddie regales May’s unfortunate gentleman caller, Martin, with a long, exotic tale about the origins of their relationship, she caps the story with a curt dismissal: “None of it’s true. . . .He’s had this weird, sick idea for years now and it’s totally made up. He’s nuts.”
But which is the truth: his avowals or her denials? It’s a fair question, given May’s admission early in the play to be something of a fantasist herself. “All I see is a picture of you,” she tells Eddie. “I don’t even know if the picture’s real anymore. I don’t even care. It’s a made-up picture.”
So in this motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, all the facts are in dispute. The West has become the terrain of pure myth, pure invention, pure fabulism. The stage is populated by fantasists who disagree over their doubtful pasts, and whose present connection with one another is through equivocal pictures in their minds. Meanwhile, out in the parking lot, someone who might or might not be a countess is spraying bullets from a black Mercedes. The only figure who seems firmly rooted is Martin, the high-school grounds keeper. But even his connection with his own reality is somewhat tenuous. When asked “What kinda people do you hail from,” his response is bemused and indifferent: “I don’t know. I was adopted.”
In a way, “adoption” is the action that defines all these characters: they have adopted each other as objects of obsession, and they have adopted toward one another a variety of poses in the pursuit of love. In Savage/Love (1978), a theater piece composed of songs and poems, Shepard comes directly to the point when he asks:
Before this play, Shepard’s reputation rested on a body of work that focused almost exclusively on the instability of the male psyche and the mythology of the American West. In the three “family dramas” that immediately precede Fool For Love, Shepard shows us the pathos of American men striving -- and failing -- to live up to the archetype of masculinity established in the lost days of the old frontier. Their hopeless struggle to fill the roles of romantic cowboy or valiant homesteader -- roles that have no place in the new West of shopping malls, suburbs, and interstate highways -- results in various kinds of psychic collapse. Some of these frustrated frontiersmen decline into violence, drunkenness, and sexual depravity. Others undergo an eerie mutation into different people, ending up radically transformed from their original selves. Meanwhile, their horrified families -- manless -- slide into chaos.
In Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978) and True West (1980), the primary relationships are between man and man. Divided by generation or temperament, these men regard each other from a wary distance; and yet, despite the wariness, they almost invariably dissolve into one another. In some ways, the most extraordinary feature of these dramas is exactly this process of personal alchemy, this demonstration of the fundamentally ambiguous nature of individual identity. Cast adrift on a western landscape that no longer seems like home, these men literally don’t know how or what to be. As the old West disappears, it becomes impossible for these characters simply to “be” Western men. Instead, they become the captives of myth, or identity self-consciously adopted rather than spontaneously lived.
In the context of these earlier works, Fool For Love looks like a radical departure, its most distinctive feature being that here, for the first time, the primary conflict in a Shepard play is between man and a woman. But on closer inspection, we can see that Shepard is using the erotic terrain of male-female relationships to explore many of his accustomed themes. Once again, we find ourselves in the West, this time in a motel in the Mojave Desert. Once again his male characters, Eddie the cowboy, and a drifter called the Old Man, evoke the vanishing archetypes of western masculinity. And, most importantly, the problem of self-mutability that bedevils the men in his previous work has taken hold in this play of men and women alike. In Fool For Love, what begins as a seemingly straightforward account of yet another battle in the war between the sexes will prove in the end to be an inconclusive encounter between people whose real identities remain deeply enigmatic.
The sense of enigma begins with the title. Fool For Love: at first glance, the meaning seems obvious. From the fall of Troy to the fall of Jimmy Swaggart, romantic folly has been one of the great themes of our culture, and this play appears to be offering itself as Sam Shepard’s variation -- country-style -- on a familiar old tune.
But look again. Maybe “fool” is a verb and not a noun, and maybe “fool for love” is a sentence, and an imperative sentence at that. Thus, like the Supremes ordering the heartbreaker to “Stop, in the name of love,” Shepard might also be issuing an erotic command: “in the name of love, get out there and fool somebody.” Read in this way, the title tells us that we are in for an evening, not only of romantic folly, but of romantic trickery, manipulation, and deceit as well.
A title that points simultaneously in two different directions should put us on our toes when it comes time to meet the characters and encounter the situations that make up the imaginary world of this play. Will everything there be as equivocal as the words “fool for love?”
Well, maybe. Early in the action, the Old Man, while pointing to a non-existent picture of a beautiful country singer, offers this information about his love-life: “Barbara Mandrell. That’s who that is… I am actually married to Barbara Mandrell in my mind.” And, he declares, “That’s realism.” Now there’s as clear an example of the erotic folly and romantic deception as the stage has to offer: this old fool is clearly fooling himself, for love.
But that’s assuming that what transpires in the theater of the mind is unreal. Yet the stage directions inform us that the Old Man himself “exists only in the minds of May and Eddie” -- a fact that doesn’t stop him from sitting up there on stage spinning yarns and drinking whiskey. If May and Eddie’s joint fantasy can cut such a palpable, life-like figure, then maybe the Old Man’s fancied marriage to Barbara Mandrell isn’t such a folly after all. Maybe that union is as truly consummated on the stage of his mind as is his relationship with Eddie and May on the stage in front of our eyes.
But here again, ambiguity enters the picture. Just what is his relationship with these unhappy lovers? Eddie has one version, May another, and the Old Man himself is of two minds on the matter. “Amazing thing is,” he says, after we have been led to believe in his intimate connections with both lovers, “Amazing thing is, neither one a you look a bit familiar to me.” Later on, he will reverse himself, as he stakes out a claim on Eddie that could hardly be more profound. But between the estrangement and the bondedness lies the ambiguous heart of the play.
And what is the relationship between the lovers themselves? Since their first meeting in high school, they have been apart more often than they have been together. From one perspective, then, they’re virtual strangers, people whose lives have been led largely in one another’s absence. But no matter how often they have parted, some compulsion, some unbreakable connection has drawn them together again. And so, from a different angle of vision, they are the deepest familiars -- almost in the sense in which that term is used in witchcraft: spirits held captive by the web of magic. For Eddie and May, that web is woven by imagination, by the myths they make about one another, by the ways they fool for love.
“I thought you were supposed to be a fantasist,” the Old Man tells Eddie at the beginning of the play, an account of his character emphatically endorsed by May. When, for example, Eddie tells May that “we’re connected… We’ll always be connected. That was decided a long time ago,” May’s response is unequivocal: “Nothing was decided: You made all that up.” And after Eddie regales May’s unfortunate gentleman caller, Martin, with a long, exotic tale about the origins of their relationship, she caps the story with a curt dismissal: “None of it’s true. . . .He’s had this weird, sick idea for years now and it’s totally made up. He’s nuts.”
But which is the truth: his avowals or her denials? It’s a fair question, given May’s admission early in the play to be something of a fantasist herself. “All I see is a picture of you,” she tells Eddie. “I don’t even know if the picture’s real anymore. I don’t even care. It’s a made-up picture.”
So in this motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, all the facts are in dispute. The West has become the terrain of pure myth, pure invention, pure fabulism. The stage is populated by fantasists who disagree over their doubtful pasts, and whose present connection with one another is through equivocal pictures in their minds. Meanwhile, out in the parking lot, someone who might or might not be a countess is spraying bullets from a black Mercedes. The only figure who seems firmly rooted is Martin, the high-school grounds keeper. But even his connection with his own reality is somewhat tenuous. When asked “What kinda people do you hail from,” his response is bemused and indifferent: “I don’t know. I was adopted.”
In a way, “adoption” is the action that defines all these characters: they have adopted each other as objects of obsession, and they have adopted toward one another a variety of poses in the pursuit of love. In Savage/Love (1978), a theater piece composed of songs and poems, Shepard comes directly to the point when he asks:
When we’re tangled up in love
Is it me you’re whispering to
Or some other
………………………………………………
If you could only give me a few clues
I could invent the one you’d have me be.
No one who watches Eddie and May struggling with the ambiguities of love will doubt Shepard’s inventiveness in dealing with the world of desire. The first reviewers of Fool For Love likened the play to Strindberg or Pirandello. But Shepard’s lovers inhabit a distinctively American landscape. Heartbreaking and funny at the same time, their story is the dramatic equivalent of some insistent country ballad” it haunts us as they haunt each other.