Blood Lust

By T.E. Kalem

FOOL FOR LOVE by Sam Shepard

In Sam Shepard's plays, human contact is animal combat. There is a surreal humor in the struggle, but, make no mistake, it is a struggle to the death.

In True West, two brothers resolve their differences in the exact manner of Cain and Abel. In The Tooth of Crime, two rock stars, Hoss and Crow, meet on the killing ground of the territorial imperative. Who shall be king? The play is like the jungle ritual in which the young lion destroys the old lion to become leader of the pride.

One might assume from the title that Shepard's latest play, Fool for Love, is devoted to that magnificent obsession known as romantic love. It is, in fact, a peripheral theme. But the core of this drama is lust and blood lust. The war between the sexes is not remotely related to quibbling matches about who does the dishes and who changes the diapers. Indeed Shepard's family plays, Buried Child, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, and Curse of the Starving Class, display no traces of cozy domesticity. There is only the baleful sense of wary enemies endlessly circling and stalking each other, waiting to deliver, or receive, an invisible dagger thrust. In Fool for Love, the lovers, Eddie (Ed Harris) and May (Kathy Baker), are locked in a struggle for absolute power.

They have been lovers for 15 years, and they have punched quite a bit of hate into the affair. Periodically, Eddie has cut out on a freedom binge but has always returned to exact sexual fealty from May. This is another reunion in a mingy motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert. In a malignant fury over Eddie's having bedded some shadowy "countess," May resolves that it is time to say goodbye for keeps. She rants and rails and Eddie pleads and storms, but each time one threatens to go, the other extends the battle with an imperious command or a passion pitch of need.

Even the love play is ominous. At one point, Eddie and May are all over each other in a steamy clinch, at the end of which she knees him in the groin. With his cowboy spurs and boots -- Shepard's symbols for the untrammeled, virile male -- Eddie hurls himself against walls, somersaults across the floor and swings his lariat to rope in bedposts and random chairs. This is an amusing form of sexual intimidation, but it does not wholly evade silliness. It works best in a macho-vs.-mouse encounter between Eddie and the gentleman caller (Dennis Ludlow) who has come to take May to a movie.

In an effort to give a vivid but scarcely mind-churning work more mythic gravity, Shepard makes known along the way that the lovers are half sister and half brother. Somehow this lacks impact, merely suggesting that incest is the most potent brand of sibling rivalry. In the cast at off-Broadway's Circle Repertory Company, Ed Harris invests Eddie with the driving electric intensity of a younger Robert Duvall, and Kathy Baker's May is a scorchy spitfire.

The defects that mar Fool for Love --slapdash structuring, spongy logic --are not unique to Sam Shepard, now nearing 40, but weaken the works of oft-called "promising" U.S. playwrights in the same generation. To transform experience into consciousness is what differ entiates art from reportage. It is not enough to leave a theater knowing what we have seen. We ought to leave it knowing more than we knew. Shepard does not really provide that illumination, nor do Lanford Wilson, David Mamet, Albert Innaurato, David Rabe, Thomas Babe, Israel Horovitz, Terrence McNally and Christopher Durang.

Yet in his play Action, Shepard expounds a Whitmanesque vision of the U.S. with which he rightly finds himself in profound affinity: "He expected some thing from America. He had this great expectation." So do we all.

-- By T.E. Kalem This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.