Sam Shepard, scribe of the angst-ridden American prairie, was the playwright who made Steppenwolf’s bones. In 1982, the theater company’s signature staging of his “True West” was the apotheosis of a certain kind of Chicago-style theater: aggressive, in-your-face, compelled by uncontrollable impulses, no holds barred.
Shepard himself did not actually have a close relationship with Steppenwolf in that era, the late playwright once told me, but no matter. The two are linked in Chicago theater mythology. And so when Steppenwolf revives “Fool for Love,” Shepard’s raw 1983 drama about a compulsively dysfunctional couple, May (Caroline Neff) and Eddie (Nick Gehlfuss), who resemble combatants in a human rodeo as they lunge at each other during a single night in their seedy motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, it intersects with its own history. Especially since “Fool for Love” itself was produced there in a similarly famous production with Rondi Reed and William Petersen.
Given that context, the new staging from director Jeremy Herrin also featuring Tim Hopper as the Old Man and Cliff Chamberlain as the whiplashed latecomer to the party, feels too tame.
The show has its potent moments, mostly courtesy of the gutsy Neff, who throws herself courageously at the play without enough coming back her way, and the production knows how to exploit the play’s sardonic humor. But I doubt you’ll walk out the door feeling like the case was made for doing this play in the here and now. The production feels like it operates from the outside, looking back at the play quizically, as an external thing, a past moment, rather than operating in real-time and pouring out its insides from its molten core.
I found myself wondering if the issue was the age of the script itself. Steppenwolf certainly has not lost its knack for intensity and fearlessness, as anyone who saw the Broadway-bound “Purpose,” “Little Bear Ridge Road” or “Bug” can attest. This kind of amoral exploration of raw sexual desire certainly clashes with today’s more moralistic theater sensibility; time (and copycats) have made the play’s formative dreamscape feel much less radical. The play also has to compete with the memory of Robert Altman’s 1985 film version of “Fool for Love,” which, despite flopping at the box office, understood this landscape and gave these two characters real nobility in their hapless obsession with each other.
But I don’t think that’s the issue. “Fool for Love” still has much to say about what self-delusional parents can do to their children and, once so done to, how those children fight to contain the damage even as it is writ large on their psyches. This is a play about compulsion and giving over to raw desire — hardly archaic in a country whose moral center currently seems as elusive as a Mohave porcupine. And, to some degree, the play is about the pure willfulness of sexual love and a meditation on the pluses and minuses thereof. All things still worth exploring in the theater.
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Herrin’s show has an atmospheric set from Todd Rosenthal, red neon signs and all, and plenty of other Southwestern iconography in its gestalt, but that can’t just be the setting. It should ooze from the show’s rhythms.
The direction needs more of the stultifying heat of a nighttime human rodeo in the desert, more of its sensual soundscape, a better acquaintance with its pauses and silences and its latent impact on human desire. It doesn’t seem to fully understand its ability to function as a dangerous aphrodisiac.
“Fool for Love” is centered on the motel room passion between the two central characters but there is an Old Man off to the side, telling the story.
Herrin seems to have gone for simplicity with how he conceived Hopper’s role, and fair enough. But there’s heavy symbolic weight on this character’s back and, somehow, the way he is rooted to his chair throughout doesn’t entirely work in this incarnation, rendering him too peripheral. Hopper is a superb actor, as is intermittently clear here, and yet he somehow feels stuck there in a separate world, distinct from the one the Old Man actually has conceived. In more ways than one.
The show is worth seeing for Neff’s raw determination and I suspect it will deepen over time. But I wish Gehlfuss, who has much talent, would stop playing a cowboy with a rope, which he does perfectly well, and wrestle with being one instead. Then we might feel that this couple has no choice about what they are doing with and to each other and have to deal with all the implications of that on the way home.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Fool for Love” (3 stars)
When: Through March 23
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes
Tickets: $20-$138 at 312-335-1650 and steppenwolf.org
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