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Use your delusion

By BILL RODRIGUEZ  |  June 23, 2009

As well as being a head-shaking examination of opinions and contradictions of compulsive love relationships, Fool for Love is also an exploration of the power of imagination. Our imaginations can spin our heads around when it comes to romantic longings and jealousies, but Shepard goes on to show how our minds also can distort or heighten our sense of reality in general. Eddie tells Martin about a violent death. Then Martin is told that the incident was made up, and he believes that as readily; Eddie laughs at him, but also at the frailty of our perceptions.

Likewise, the Old Man amuses us when he points offstage to a poster of Tricia Yearwood and informs us that he's married to her "in my mind." But the play also gives him the last line, as he looks again to the image of the woman we can't see (fantasy upon fantasy) and declares: "She's mine!" What, Shepard would ask us, is the felt difference between that and Eddie's or May's or our own past or present romantic delusions? Delusion is, after all, as illusion does.

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Related: Rash relations, Running onward, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, More more >
  Topics: Theater , Entertainment, Performing Arts, Theater,  More more >
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ARTICLES BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
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