MAGNETIC EMBRACE: May (Audra Curtis) and Eddie (Charles Parker Newton). |
| Fool for Love by Sam Shepard | Directed by Bill Steele | Produced by the University of Southern Maine Theatre Department | at Russell Hall in Gorham | through October 12 | 207.780.5151 |
Somewhere at the edge of the Mojave Desert is a stubborn, squalid beacon of American life. It’s the classic nowhere hotel room: cheap plywood doors, wistful neon blue through plastic blinds, a lurid yellow light through glass Deco squares in the bathroom wall, the sad, thin pink of the bedspread (excellent set and light design by Calien Lewis and Nick Cyr). In this room, two doomed lovers meet — not for the first and surely not for the last time — in Sam Shepard’s dark romance of love and the American West, Fool For Love.
May (Audra Curtis) has been left, wooed back, and abandoned again too many times by drifter horse wrangler Eddie (Charles Parker Newton), with whom she shares a bond of shame and wrongness. Each time, she’s picked up the pieces and found a new town, a new life, only to have him find and agonize her yet again. This time, he finds her in her latest rented room. She still hates him with the same intensity that she can’t bear to see him go, and their restless flee-and-chase dance, around and around, is deadly, but as familiar to them as the endless desert horizon.
Curtis and Newton do fine work conveying the charged ambivalence of this pair, which snaps back and forth from May’s trembling loathing and Eddie’s sneering menace to the effortless familiarity of long conspirators. Also central to their connection is a magnetic sexuality, a force to which both are helpless, and which Curtis and Newton render start and haunting.
The depth of their rapport — both toxic and tender — is underscored by the arrival of an outsider, Martin (Jordan Handren-Seavey), a nice-enough but hapless fellow who has planned to take May to the movies. His blank equanimity throws into contrast not just Eddie’s wild cruelty, but his — to May — irresistible trickster charm.
May and Eddie share an internal landscape of memory that is intruded upon by the bourbon-swilling specter of the Old Man (Joe Mcleod), a kind of unreliable, barrel-chested Greek chorus of their past. Into this role Mcleod could infuse little more rascally charisma — memory, and particularly this incarnation of it, is nothing if not a scoundrel — but he still provides a poignant spurring on of Eddie’s wild-horse psyche.
In one of Shepard’s most evocative monologues — richly, achingly delivered by Newton — Eddie tells of accompanying that old man on a long night walk through a newly ploughed field. Soon, on the horizon, he sees the lit-up drive-in screen, and then exults in recognizing the star, huge and glorious: “Spencer Tracy, moving his mouth.” In the fertility and promise of the vision, of the rich drawl of the words in Eddie’s own mouth, it feels for just an instant as if everyone’s found a place to stop running.
Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com.
