REVIEW OF FOOL FOR LOVE
FOOL FOR LOVE
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle.
Actors Theatre of San Francisco, in association with Off the Mountain Productions, is currently presenting Sam Shepard's FOOL FOR LOVE.
As most theater critics, thespian purists, divorce lawyers, sub-prime mortgage brokers, right-wing politicians and philandering husbands will tell you, acting is an art, not an artifice.
World-renowned director and award winning acting teacher, Jean Shelton, directs this metaphorical, roman a clef, quasi-autobiographical, sensually twisted love story through its psychological complexities and up and down its erotic alleyways.
Sam Shepard is described by Newsweek magazine as one of the "best and most challenging playwrights" in contemporary America.
This same reviewer goes on to say that "His plays are a form of exorcism, magical, sometimes surreal rituals that grapple with the demonic forces in the lunatic fringes of the American landscape."
Countless discredited studies, by the pseudo-scientific community, have invariably concluded that people who ultimately spend their retirement years mindlessly massaging the buttons on their TV remotes have no explanation, not a clue, as to how they got dumped at the end-of-the-road 500-channel oasis in the cultural desert.
Their children eventually wheel them up the non-skid ramps of low budget rest homes, where burly and matronly undocumented healthcare workers will position them like so many sunflowers to bask in the strobing radiance of a communal big screen TV.
How do these people invite this nescience and senescence into their lives?
By eating under-cooked beef from Great Britain?
By attempting to distill Vodka from a broth of woodchips, newspaper, cotton rags and fermenting yeast?
By spray-painting candy-apple polyurethane finishes on cars without the benefit of a gas mask?
By eating alien mushrooms that they've never seen before?
The answer is: they hollow out their cranial cavities by deliberately sidestepping challenging and engaging theater like Sam Shepard.
Jean Shelton has assembled a superb cast, which more than measures up to the rigors of this gritty, western, love tragedy.
Alessandro Garcia (Eddie) deftly treads the thin line between a brooding, tormented, menacing, possessive, unfaithful, abusive macho cowboy and an eloquently tender lover who mated for life during his salad days in high school.
You may not have seen Marlon Brando in 1947 at the Barrymore Theatre in New York when he first performed Stanley Kowalski in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE for director Elia Kazan: so don't make the same mistake twice by missing Alessandro Garcia at Actors Theatre.
Just as Brando revolutionized acting techniques and set the model for the American form of method acting, MR Garcia is a fresh adherent or acolyte to this verita style.
Director Jean Shelton is the obvious connection: it is no coincidence that her career also began in New York City in 1947 when she was associated with Lee Strasberg: one of the founders of the method style of acting.
Premstar Santana (May) has a sultry, sizzling schizophrenic sensuous intensity and achieves a tangled conflicted eroticism that is as tragic as it is tantalizing and titillating.
Ropes, spurs, a family-sized bottle of tequila, a high-mileage lumpy stained double bed and a cheesy motel room along with MS Santana in racy black undergarmets cantilevers most of the audience, with a functioning endocrine system, to the edge of their seats with prurient and lascivious expectancy.
Set designer Biz Duncan will get no awards from BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS but he should get recognized for achieving a surreal level of sleaze rarely evidenced outside Bohemia, low-rent trailer parks and meth houses.
Costume designer James Baldock may not know the difference between haute couture and rive gauche but he deserves cudos for cranking up the heat with MS Santana's wardrobe.
If you never knew who your father was, Joe Madero (Old Man) plays the kind of absentee, peripatetic father that would get you to decline a DNA paternity check.
MR Madero is able to achieve that lowball befuddled victim status every horn-dog, low-life philander from Clinton to Edwards seems to exude.
With whiskey baited breath, a roving eye and a surrendering heart, MR Madero's Old Man seems to slip the reins and step over the traces of a lifetime's worth of familial responsibility, domesticity and honorable commitment.
The collective effect of great directing, polished acting and a terrific set design are guaranteed to achieve a little alchemy or in the words of Newsweek: "exorcism, magical and sometimes surreal."
Do not miss this stunning production of a Shepard classic.
If you do, expect Nurse Ratched to torment you in your Golden Years.
For tickets, surf on over to www.actorstheatresf.org or cell phone, while you are not driving, 415-345-1287.
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