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Shepherding Sam requires a knack for ferocity.
Guide one of Sam Shepard's volatile, machismo-powered plays with anything less than four-to-the-floor fierceness and it's embarrassingly obvious: barking dialogue with no bite. I've never seen a director or actor commit that sin, and not only because anger is among the easier emotions to call forth, and fall back upon, on stage.
Performers, audiences and, yes, critics, can mistake shouting for acting, making it one of the craftier ways to camouflage a production's flaws. And in the Shepardian universe—often a dramaturgy of desolation and damnation in both the setting and the soul, raw and relentless in True West, Cowboy Mouth, Fool for Love, The Tooth of the Crime and Buried Child—the sheer electricity of anger unleashed can be a show's crutch, a distraction from its weaknesses. Not to mention overwhelming the point of a Shepard character's diatribe. Noise trumping nuance.
That disguise, and the casting error it's disguising, hobbles Test Market's translation of Fool for Love, Downtown at the Arts Factory. But in tackling one of Shepard's most intense, scorched-earth dramas in the desert—human misery blowing by like tumbleweeds buffeted by the winds of a gathering storm—director Ernest Hemmings and his four-person cast (including himself) provide compensatory pleasures even while smothering the smoldering core of Shepard's incendiary incest tragedy.
A one-hour one-act, Fool is set in a seedy, roadside motel room in New Mexico. In its modest venue, Test Market and set designer Thomas Meyer replicate ramshackle damn well, the mangy, filth-flecked set resembling cough phlegm, if a cough were a desert dump with furniture. Waitress May (Amy Nixon), waiting on a date with a nice, new man in her life, is upset by the sudden reappearance of Eddie (Joel Wayman), her rough-hewn, cowboy ex-lover. Their emotionally charged exchanges and cruel, bitter taunts reveal a pair of battered, broken souls who can't abide life with or without each other, stuck in a spiral of pain, regret and longing.
We eventually learn that after they became high-school lovers, May and Eddie discovered they were half-brother and sister. (When Shepard goes for vice, he goes for broke.) They shared a footloose father (Bobby Rodgers), who spends the entire play in a corner chair, commenting on the action like a one-man, dirt-encrusted Greek chorus, and apparently existing only in the half-sib/ex-lovers' minds. It's a bonanza of dysfunction rife with mind games born of rage, envy and regret. Then the tumult is thrown into fourth gear when clueless, stiff-legged Martin (Hemmings), clutching flowers like some morose Steve Urkel, comes-a-callin' for May and winds up fixed in Eddie's psychologically twisted gun sights. By the time everyone's through screaming, sobbing and threatening—underscored by hurled chairs, smashed bottles, fondled body parts, barking dogs, glaring car headlights and busted windshields—more family tragedy is uncorked.
Shepard's setup has been endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted, but the sturdiest perspective of Fool is the duality of reckless passion, and metaphorically, life, as May and Eddie grapple with a relationship at once beautiful and ugly, as well as the dual dynamics of their respective mothers' fates and their dad's divided allegiances, dooming both his families.
Life as duality, and duality as destruction.
That's a hefty chunk of despair to swallow in one gulp. It takes actors who, beyond rafter-rattling, can strike the softer notes on the Shepard scale of scarred emotion, so their enormous vulnerabilities—these are, after all, walking shells of human wreckage—are exposed like raw meat. Unfortunately, only Wayman comes close, which brings us to the casting conundrum.
There's no sensitive, politically correct option here: Nixon is a stocky actress and flat-out physically wrong as May, especially for anyone who remembers Kim Basinger in the film role opposite Shepard himself as Eddie. (Slender, blonde Francine Gordon, Hemmings' TM cohort, would have been a much wiser choice.) When she and Wayman embrace and nuzzle and he paws her breast, it plays like a horny nephew seducing his matronly aunt. Distinctly un-erotic, even creepy, given the reckless animals-in-heat compulsion penned by Shepard, their odd-couple clinches suck the heat, and Fool's reason for being, right off the stage. That leaves merely galloping through the motions, boisterously. Nixon compounds her miscasting by setting May at near hysteria from the start and hovering there throughout.
Cowboy Eddie, essentially a mesquite-grilled Stanley Kowalski, is better served by Wayman. In white T-shirt, black jeans, boots and spurs, and sporting a bushy, vaguely nasty mustache, Wayman modulates Eddie's moods from menacing and violent to reflective and even tender, but with a pulsing unpredictability. You believe he can blow at any moment—and does. As their no-good roustabout dad, Rodgers is a lively ol' coot with a sardonic delivery and an unrepentant, spit-in-yer-eye defiance. But director Hemmings also miscast himself as kind, confused Martin. Courting political incorrectness once more, I've got to believe that if Shepard meant May's suitor to be black, it would have significantly altered Eddie's reaction and the play's overall dynamic. Color-blind casting is admirable when practical, but not when it undermines the integrity of the script.
Pockmarked with problems, Test Market's production fails to play Sam Shepard for a Fool.