Fool for Love at the Steppenwolf ain’t exactly a romantic play to take your date to see on Valentine’s Day.
If you do that, you and your date might wind up asking each other to take a DNA test before proceeding any further with the relationship.
See, Fool for Love involves a cowboy type and a woman who just happen to have the same dad. Their old man was a bigamist.
The couple fell for each other in high school and may or may not have known they were related when they foolishly fell in love. Dad haunts the couple as they meet up once more at a fleabag hotel somewhere in the southwest in the early 1980s.
Either way, to say Eddie and May have had a tempestuous relationship over the years would be an understatement – sort of like saying the Kansas City Chiefs lost badly to the Philadelphia Eagles in the recent Super Bore.
Nope. This isn’t a romantic comedy. Not everything has to be hearts and flowers, right?
That’s why it’s a good idea to read a bit about a play or a movie before you attend. Afterward, too. You might wind up learning a thing or two or refreshing your memory.
This being for Free Craic, what I found during my Fool for Love lessons is that one of the things that influenced Sam Shepard to become a playwright was watching the 1962 film version of Irish American Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
O’Neill’s masterwork, first staged after his death, “explores themes of addiction, regret, familial dysfunction, and the inescapable influence of the past,” as the National Park Service website understates it. (Yeah. The NPS. O’Neill’s Tao House in Danville, CA is a National Historic Site.)
Anyway, Fool for Love checks all those thematic boxes.
It checks boxes with O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which the NPS calls “a tragic exploration of self-delusion, despair, and the human need for illusion in order to cope with life’s harsh realities.”
In Fool for Love, the Old Man – sitting offstage as a ghost or figment of two imaginations – tells Eddie that he’s married to country music star Barbara Mandrell.
Eddie doesn’t believe him.
“Well, see, now that’s the difference right there. That’s realism. I am actually married to Barbara Mandrell in my mind. Can you understand that?,” the Old Man says.
“Sure,” Eddie replies. (Note: Mandrell had a big hit called Sleeping Single in a Double Bed.)
At another point, the Old Man says “if you tell a story and you know it’s a story, it’s not a lie.”
Pipe dreams in “Iceman.” Same thing.
O’Neill’s work being Irish, though, takes hours to get to its points. Shepard’s Fool for Love clocks in at about 65 minutes.
Still, back in 1985, Kevin Kelly wrote in the Boston Globe that Shepard was the “single most important American playwright since Eugene O’Neill.”
O’Neill’s influence on Shepard is the subject of at least one academic paper, too, namely this one. It claims that both writers were influenced by ancient Greek playwrights’ world view that “human destiny is shaped to a considerable extent by forces outside ourselves.”
Shepard died in 2017 at the age of 73. This obituary touches on Shepard’s ties to O’Neill and the Greeks, too, and lots of other stuff.
If you know your Chicago theater lore, then-fledgling Steppenwolf’s production of True West back in the early 1980s pretty much put the company on the map. It played a key role in launching the careers of John Malkovich, Gary Sinise, Laurie Metcalf and Jeff Perry.
Per that production and beyond, Steppenwolf became known for its visceral, physical, in your face performance style. In fact, the company has staged five of Shepard’s works. The current incarnation of Fool for Love comes 41 years after a version that starred William Petersen and Rondi Reed.
Cripes! Petersen is going to be 72 years old on Feb. 21.
Another Irish connection to Fool for Love. The current production ends with things going up in flames and the star-crossed lovers apparently heading out in their versions of an Irish goodbye.
As for what I took away from the production: the day after I saw it, I wound up babysitting for Best Fest Buddy Tom’s grandkids. They can get as dramatic as anything staged at Steppenwolf.
They also can be funny, charming, inquisitive and kind. For instance, at the small museum we visited, they all did a scavenger hunt, befriended other kids, listened attentively to the young woman working that afternoon and even cleaned up after themselves in the playroom.
I just hope my part in their fate tends toward the latter.
Then again, they took it upon themselves to hawk candy door-to-door on the Saturday I trekked to Fool for Love. To make money for themselves. So maybe I should watch or read Death of a Salesman or Glengarry Glen Ross before I watch them again.
I recently took one of them to see the Dog Man movie. Turns out Dog Man’s nemesis, Petey the Cat, had a terrible dad, which is what leads to all the trouble. That includes Petey making a clone of himself, who turns out to be a good kitty.
Petey abandons Lil Petey. Dog Man befriends Lil Petey. No more spoilers.
Essentially, the message Lil Petey doles out is “Love isn’t just a feeling, it’s also something you do.”
So basically, it’s a way, way more optimistic take on the Fool for Love theme.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
