Fool for Love is a play written by American playwright and actor Sam Shepard. The play focuses on May and Eddie, former lovers who have met again in a motel in the desert. The play premiered in 1983 at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, where Shepard was the playwright-in-residence. The play was a finalist for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play is part of a quintet which includes Shepard's Family Trilogy: Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, and True West. The quintet concludes with Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind.
Plot
The "fools" in the play are battling lovers at a run-down Mojave Desert motel. May is staying at the motel when an old flame, Eddie, shows up. Eddie tries to convince May to come back to him and live in a trailer on a farm in Wyoming that Eddie has always wanted to buy and where he has always imagined living with May. May vehemently refuses. She says that she has absolutely no interest in living with Eddie under such circumstances, that she has a job and started a new life and knows that if she goes back to Eddie their relationship will repeat the same destructive cycle it has followed before. Throughout the play the character of the Old Man—apparently the father of both lovers—sits to the side and talks to May and Eddie and offers commentary on each character and about himself. It is revealed that the Old Man had led a double life, abandoning each family for different periods during each child's life. The two became lovers in their high school years and when their parents finally figured out what had occurred, Eddie's mother shot herself. May is afraid that Eddie has begun to emulate his father; taking to drinking and secretly seeing a woman May refers to as the Countess. The play centers around the drama of the confrontation rather than a plot with any rising and falling action. In the end Eddie appears to have left May, just as his father had left his mother, and May has packed her suitcase to go off somewhere unspecified. Eddie and May have not reconciled, the Old Man has begun to drift off in denial that Eddie's mother had been driven to suicide, and May's erstwhile date, Martin, is left on stage bewildered to observe it all.
Themes and analysis
Sean Murray, the artistic director of Cygnet Theatre, San Diego, spoke of True West and Fool for Love, which he presented in repertory in 2014: “There’s a definite crisis of identity going on in both these plays... And it’s as if both sets of are doomed to be together... Both plays are about family and genealogy and being connected to your genetic brood,... And they also share the 'iconic Sam Shepard father character—that disconnected, alcoholic father who can’t communicate, who’s trying so hard to make it work.'" Nelson Pressley, reviewing a regional production in The Washington Post, referred to the play as having a "vintage Sam Shepard desperation-at-the-edge-of-the-desert look" with a "twisted cowboy romance." In reviewing the Williamstown Theatre Festival production from 2014, the reviewers noted that the play is "a masterpiece of understatement and allusion. But as with Sam Shepard plays, the words escalate into explosive action, the actors tearing at each other like mortal enemies." In another analysis of the Williamstown production, Elyse Sommer notes: "Like all of Shepard's best plays, despite the evocative Mojave Desert outside the motel room in which it plays out, the landscape here is of the emotions that contain states of mind inside the self... Eddie and May have no tragic flaw or fateful quest but are just caught up in sorting through the emotional tumult of their lives in a power struggle where identity is vague and the past haunts the present."
Fool for Love was a finalist for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play won the 1984 Obie Awards for: Direction, Best New American Play, and Performance: Ed Harris, Kathy Baker and Will Patton. Ian Charleson was nominated for the 1984 Olivier Award, Actor of the Year in a New Play; Julie Walters was nominated for the 1984 Olivier Award, Actress of the Year in a New Play.
