Love, Fight, Repeat
Directors
How director Daniel Aukin keeps the dance of dysfunction moving in Fool for Love
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The volatile couple at the center of Sam Shepard’s explosive 1984 drama Fool for Love may be ill-fated, but good mojo helped fuel the play’s current revival at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. When the production originated at the 2014 Williamstown Theatre Festival, Chris Pine and Lauren Ambrose were announced as the star-crossed lovers, Eddie and May. But when they had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts, director Daniel Aukin immediately thought of two actors he had long admired as last-minute replacements: Sam Rockwell and Tony winner Nina Arianda.
“I was a huge fan of Nina’s, and I had done a workshop with Sam a few years prior, and we had even talked about Fool for Love as something we both would like to do someday,” says Aukin, an in-demand director for two decades who’s making his Main Stem debut with Fool for Love. “Luckily, they both loved the play and were available,” and a month later the show opened to rapturous reviews.
One small but striking modification is the deafening and unsettling electrical hum that now opens and closes the show. In Williamstown it was only employed at the beginning. Adding it at the end makes the action of the tense, 75-minute production feel unfinished, like the cycle of love and violence is destined to repeat. You get the sense that Eddie and May will live to fight another day. After all, it’s what they’ve been doing the entire show.
“In some ways it feels like the play keeps restarting over and over and over again,” Aukin says. “These two people are locked in a struggle, and they reach these dead ends but eventually find ways to reengage. It makes me think of Boléro, that kind of repetition. One of the big challenges was finding ways for that to have a forward momentum and not feel like we were repeating the same thing over and over, even though in some ways they are.”
Once Martin (played by Tom Pelphrey) enters the scene, the dynamic evolves. “I think he’s our man on the ground,” Aukin explains. “He’s as close as the audience gets to a stand-in for ourselves, and it’s a completely new energy. He has no idea what he’s walked into.”
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Raven Snook is the associate editor of TDF Stages
Photos by Joan Marcus. Top image: Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda in Fool for Love.
RAVEN SNOOK