Throughout his work, playwright Sam Shepard’s subject boils down to the ache of human need. His dialogue rarely reveals what someone’s thinking but always hints at the weight of it. It’s the stare of the cowboy, the silence of the woman spurned. In his acclaimed Fool for Love, Shepard trains his gimlet eye on human passion, pushing stay-or-go opposition to the snapping point.
The solid performances in the Shaker Bridge Theatre production crackle with tension. Director Adrian Wattenmaker emphasizes precise movement, building scenes that ripple along the edges of attraction and aggression. But the action resolves nothing — here, need is never quenched.
In a shabby motel room near the Mojave desert, May (Sarah Killough) lives with little but a job as a cook, a small suitcase for moving on and a hot red dress. Eddie (Jacob A. Ware), a past love who’s been in and out of her life since high school, tracks her down and asks her to move with him to a trailer in Wyoming. He’ll settle down, maybe leave his rodeo career. The topic is essentially reconciliation, but this couple operate at an archetypal level. They’re testing whether love is possible.
The play opens with Eddie working resin into his bronco-riding gloves and May sitting on the edge of the bed, head hanging straight down. When he stands up, she wordlessly collapses at his feet, wrapping her arms around his leg. It’s sweet for a moment, but when he tries to sway himself loose, her silent grip won’t yield. They are stuck between escape and connection.
They rattle themselves free to argue. May says she’s waiting for a man to come over that night. Eddie doubts it, threatening to leave and threatening to stay. They pitch words like daggers and tear at each other with movement that is on the brink of exploding but always held back. The deliberate pace allows us to see their thoughts form and to recoil as they try each surprising choice.
Shepard’s language constrains them to implications. They cannot say what hurts; they can only lunge at each other when it does. Understatement is a kind of cruelty, and Eddie and May hover at a breaking point. The past won’t allow the present to start; there is never a future.
Quietly onstage throughout is the Old Man (Mark S. Cartier), who observes and comments, perhaps only in the other characters’ heads. He tells anecdotes marinated in peculiar details, and through them we slowly piece together a disturbing truth about Eddie and May. Shepard’s story is about love’s impossibility and its necessity. The Old Man is a parent, unwilling to communicate anything directly but content to fill his offspring with stories that suggest he’ll always have control over them.
Outside the motel room, headlights and sounds in the parking lot hint at other trouble stalking Eddie. He and May are under a kind of siege. Her possible date proves real when Martin (Nick Sweetland) actually arrives and at first appears to be a physical rival to Eddie. But while Eddie and May live in a heightened world, Martin schlumps in from his lawn-care job, unable to comprehend the wild tension surging in the room.
Running a gripping 85 minutes, performed without intermission, Fool for Love sits somewhere between tragedy and comedy. The laughs are few but solid; the sense of loss is ever present. It won the 1984 Obie Award for Best New American Play.
Performing the 40-year-old play now brings it to audiences less attuned to the power of the silent male stare, the exhilaration of escaping relationships, the yearning for connection expressed in a hand spinning a waist into a clutched embrace. The play’s powerful archetypes trade in an older vocabulary. Yet Shepard’s characters remain majestic and frightening. When they close a door, a sound effect amplifies the slam into a boom. Even the bed is attacked, with Eddie stomping through the sheets in his boots and May entombing herself in a pillow.
Audience and actors today live in a world less populated with surly men and desperate women, and the culture Shepard saw so keenly is one most people would reject now. Does the play still work if Eddie doesn’t employ a brutal swagger or May doesn’t lean toward abject surrender?
For this reviewer, a loss of machismo weakened the production, but the key missing piece was an all-encompassing private world that swallows May and Eddie. Both actors conveyed their wounds with arresting power but stopped short of showing me why the characters keep reaching for what destroys them.
Ware’s performance is too tender to carry the dangerous desire the character can’t shuck, but he is also hypnotic onstage. Killough’s plaintive evocation of a woman on the edge of collapse is too haunted to leave her open for more, but she is also a powerful force in every scene. Their work is impressive, as is that of Cartier, who is effortlessly riveting as he unspools the Old Man’s stories.
Shepard typically crosses into unreality, and the trick is making that world feel more true than the real one. I recommend seeing this production and its solid portrayals of characters down to their very last chance. Wattenmaker and the actors understand the work well. But the dark turn in the story feels less like a fable than an ugly event best hushed up. We want to turn away, not understand.
Though the performances don’t elevate the play into myth, they do deliver theater worth knowing. Fool for Love is about people in need, bleached dry from desperation, considering, of all things, another trip through the desert.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Hearts of the West | Theater review: Fool for Love, Shaker Bridge Theatre”
This article appears in January 28 • 2026.
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