Lick some numbing salt from your hand and get ready with a wedge of lime, because the Steppenwolf Theatre production of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” plays a lot like a perfect tequila shot. It’s compact, it’s intense, it’s got layers, and it’s hella bracing in that pleasantly unpleasant way.
It also proves, as if this needed proving, that Shepard’s writing — off-kilter, richly iconographic, mysteriously deep in feeling, darkly humorous, and most of all crackling with explosive possibility — matches ideally with Steppenwolf’s brand of acting artistry.
In this case, that artistry comes in the form of actors familiar to the Steppenwolf stage — Caroline Neff, Tim Hopper, and Cliff Chamberlain — and one who isn’t: Nick Gehlfuss of “Shameless” and “Chicago Med” fame, who should be given instant ensemble member status if he wants it. He’s a memorable part of the theater’s storied history now.
Neff and Gehlfuss play May and Eddie, characters embodied by Rondi Reed and William Petersen when the theater staged the play in 1984, and by Kim Basinger and Shepard himself in the 1985 film version.
May and Eddie are on-again, off-again, on-again lovers in a story about what you can’t have and can’t not have and are perpetually doomed to regret having when you’ve got it and long for when you don’t. It’s about how we tend to repeat the history of our parents and how there’s nothing more tempting than the taboo. It’s about, in other words, love — both the sexual and family kind — and human foolishness, which might just be the same thing.
Neff (“Linda Vista,” “Airline Highway” and so many more) is as superb as ever. She brings an absolute honesty to May’s blatantly competing impulses towards Eddie and the range of emotions he brings out in her. Those aren’t just love and hate; that’s too easy. In Neff’s soulful performance, there’s also an apparent exhaustion at the games they play, and the sudden surges of adrenaline that keep her playing them. Neff’s May knows exactly how this is all going to turn out, and knows Eddie better than he knows himself, and yet somehow manages to keep us, and herself, guessing.
Gehlfuss’ Eddie isn’t quite so honest with himself. He lets himself believe, throws himself fully and completely into the fantasy of relationship commitment and contentment until the moment he doesn’t. He pulls out all his tricks, sometimes literally by showing off his lassoing skills on the bedposts in a sequence that epitomizes how unshyly Shepard blended mythic Americana, visceral masculinity and emotional metaphor into a reality true to the character. Gehlfuss delivers a wonderful physicality here — Shepard described Eddie as giving “the impression he’s rarely off a horse” — as well as, at moments, an affecting vulnerability.
There are two other characters here. One is Martin, a notably uncharismatic romantic option for May and the character most open to interpretation, because he’s a functional foil for Eddie and May’s power plays. In Cliff Chamberlain’s portrayal, Martin’s mostly just confused, which leads nicely to several genuinely funny moments when we can see him start putting together some pieces.
And serving as the complicated connective tissue between Eddie and May, as well as a ghostly presence, as well as a wholly unreliable narrator type, we have The Old Man. If you want to appreciate Shepard’s meaningful wordsmithing, it’s worth pondering the article in that character name. In one of his best performances, Tim Hopper engagingly brings the right sense of playful theatricality — he’s there and not there — to this familiar Shepard figure: the disappearing father, the nomadic romantic, the ancestor making demands.
This superlative production is directed by Brit Jeremy Herrin, in a Chicago debut for the ages, providing 65 minutes of theater that’s both fun and disturbing. Not only does he bring out extraordinary performances, he has aligned a design team to put us right where we should be: in the ’80s, in a seedy motel room in the vast American Southwest of the Mojave Desert, in an expressive space that’s claustrophobic and where the sound of slamming doors lingers.
It’s a world where Eddie and May collide with their own demons as much as with each other, as they flail loudly towards their self-imposed, and unavoidable, destinies.