STAGE REVIEW : ‘FOOL FOR LOVE’ RINGS TRUE AT THEATRE CENTER

Leave it to Sam Shepard to write the kind of play that will transcend the color barrier without any audible clash of dialects or vernaculars.

When the Los Angeles Theatre Center announced it was staging an all-black version of Shepard’s “Fool for Love,” the primary question was would it work, could it work, without changing the lines?

It would, it could and under Julie Hebert’s faithful-to-the-original direction, for the most part it does.

More to the point: Does changing the color of the actors’ skins add anything to the original? No, but it doesn’t detract either. It simply becomes a choice--something not different but new to do with an entertaining bit of American myth-making, from that mythology’s favorite and most ingenious son.

What “Fool for Love” is, other than quintessential Sam Shepard, is poetic. Who would have guessed that from the raucously exhausting free-for-all that goes on for better than an hour and a half in that godforsaken motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert where the play rages on?

Anyone who reads Shepard.

On the face of it, the situation is simple: A man and a woman are locked in combat over love--do they want it, whom do they want it with, where and when do they want it and can they have it, considering the murkiness of certain dubious family connections?

Funny? Yes, funny, but the humor is slightly adumbrated--strained and strange around the edges, like this relationship. Who are these people? Why is the pull on their heartstrings such a strenuous tug of muscle, sinew and war? And who is that silent old man sitting in the downstage corner, at once in and out of the room?

Eddie (Richard Lawson) has come 2,480 miles to find his lover May (Pam Grier) in this stark motel-room-of-the-mind, the place where he has lost and must recover her, except that May is not sure she wants to go back to Eddie.

Roping the bedpost with his lasso proves easier for Eddie than grabbing hold of the mercurial, vituperative May. Too many things get in the way--such as the deadly Countess, that other woman Eddie’s been seeing, whose careening headlights and screeching brakes are after both of them; or sweet, milquetoast Martin (Henry G. Sanders), who comes by to take May to boredom and the movies.

But those are not real obstacles. More serious ghosts populate Eddie’s and May’s collisions. One of them is that old man in the rocking chair (Moses Gunn), nursing the bottle of Jim Beam. Wasn’t he married to each of their mothers? And what does that tell us about the two of them-- exactly?

Eddie and May lash each other with words, toss them through the air like stones, punch each other out, yell, kick, run into walls, duck under beds, slam doors and unearth family secrets like the nefarious harvest of an untidy anthropology.

Vintage Shepard. Realism here is nowhere to be found. Instead, we have ceremoniously entered a pure landscape of the mind. What higher form of ceremony can there be than the utter stillness at the opening of the play? Where, but in the mind, would a disheveled bed be placed dead center in an empty motel room? Or a character (the Countess) be sketched purely through its automotive trappings? And another (the old man) be both in the scene and not, as though memory alone were enough to actuate-- compel-- its presence?

Gunn’s old man is a model of drunken restraint, just enigmatic enough to not appear phlegmatic. And Sanders’ is a teddy bear.

At the moment Grier and Lawson understand their roles as radical combatants with their heads, and it may take another week or two before the knowledge travels to their guts. More passion is wanted, but the characters are in place. What they need now is the raw energy that unleashes actors, stuns an audience and makes it marvel at the frenzy bouncing off the walls.

(That sort of passionate wildness made Ed Harris--as Eddie--go through an entire performance in New York one night with a flowing nosebleed, while his co-star kept supplying Kleenex from the on-stage bathroom. They never missed a beat.)

Taking his cue from director Hebert, Andy Stacklin has designed a stark, grubby room that is a close facsimile of the Off-Broadway set. Lights by Kurt Landisman and Russell Pyle reproduce a harsh, shadowless glare. J. A. Deane and Jon Gottlieb have come up with descriptive sound effects for the offstage cars while Ardyss L. Golden’s costumes are, if not silent, appropriately unobtrusive.

Performances in the LATC’s Theatre 2 run indefinitely.