Feeling the ‘Love’

A note in the Ensemble Theatre’s program for its revival of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” in Orange reminds the audience that “at the author’s request this show is being performed without an intermission.” But that’s putting far too meek a spin on things: Shepard, who also directed the play’s Obie-winning staging, more specifically requests that “the play is to be performed relentlessly without a break.”

“Fool for Love” is a physically violent pas de deux for Eddie and May (Vern Urich and Terri Smith), lovers locked in passionate battle because their love is taboo. He’s her half-brother, and that is merely background for a tug-of-hearts with each pulling toward and away at the same time. “Fool for Love” must be relentless because it is Shepard’s purest equation of the geometry of obsessive love.

Fortunately for us, director Roosevelt Blankenship Jr. and his cast have left the meekness for the program note. The tiny Ensemble, with its three rows of fewer than 40 seats, has too often made plays claustrophobic when they shouldn’t be; for the first time for this writer, the space has been matched with the play in which claustrophobia is a strength. If we feel the walls coming in around Eddie and May in their fleabag motel room, all the better.

Taking on a role that has caused more cut arms and hands and broken bones to more actors (Ed Harris, Will Patton and on and on) than maybe any other contemporary part, Urich comes storming into May’s place like a snorting bull and rarely lets up.

Smith’s May, no shrinking violet and the kind of non-petite woman Shepard prefers in the role, matches Urich body slam for body slam. You worry that the bed and walls on Blankenship’s set are going to cave in from the action, or that the front door will come off its hinges from the endless slamming.

Everything holds, but it’s good that we worry: A full-force “Fool for Love” should make us feel the physical behind the words, like Nora slamming the door at the end of “A Doll’s House” a hundredfold.

Shepard’s lovers, though, can never truly leave each other, for reasons they can neither fully express nor understand. Like the doomed, heartsick people of Richard Ford’s fiction, Shepard’s men and women express themselves incoherently, and Urich and Smith connect to this dissonance.

Just as connected is Ian Downs as the clueless Martin, May’s unsuspecting movie date for the evening who’s caught up in the tornado of Eddie’s comical rage. Downs may suggest a nerdier guy than the brassy May would go for, but he allows Martin’s rough sense of pride to pop to the surface.

As the Old Man, the ghostly father of May and Eddie and the play’s one dramatic miscalculation, James Dolan has the requisite crustiness and aging macho attitude but can’t save the role from feeling like a device.

* “Fool for Love,” Ensemble Theatre, 844 E. Lincoln Ave., Suite E, Orange. Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 1. $16-$20. (949) 559-4879. Running time: 50 minutes.