Production still for "Fool for Love". Joy Dunstan as May. Photographer: David B. Simmonds
Fool for Love
By Sam Shepard
21 November 1984 – 08 December 1984 St Martins Youth Arts Centre
Playbox Theatre Company,
International Play Theatre
From the press release:
"Fool for Love is set in a stark motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert just east of Los Angeles, home of Hollywood and the American Dream. It is a tender, erotic and confronting love story between Eddie the rodeo cowboy and May his girl; both of them are drifters, searching for some sense of identity in the desert wasteland.
"Shepard's language is powerful and poetic, he creates a peculiar mixture of the ordinary and instantly recognisable, and the mythic and timeless. He touches upon our deepest mythologies, he exposes the fragility of longing, the power of obsession and the age-old question of fate versus free will.
"His characters are archetypes who owe as much to the popular iconography of advertising, comics, television and the movies, as they do to classic mythology. The rhythms of the play are cyclic and unrelenting, it has the dimension of a Greek tragedy and the humour of the best American satire, as it carries us swiftly to its sweet, brutal and inevitable conclusion."
Australian premiere.