In the first moments of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” at Shaker Bridge Theatre last Thursday, all the audience could hear was silence.
Inside a drab motel room, Eddie sits at a small table, holding his hand, the fingers bandaged with athletic tape, while a crumpled May leans over the side of a modest bed, her curly hair obscuring her face.
Tension bloomed in the air, as though the audience had been airlifted into the third act of an argument, when both parties had run out of cruel things to say.
That feeling, of being dropped into the middle of something — a dynamic, an unbreakable cycle — is at the crux of “Fool for Love,” a turbulent show that pulses with anger and desperation. The Shaker Bridge production, under the direction of Managing Director Adrian Wattenmaker, leans into the drama without coming off cheap, instead honoring the humanity of Shepard’s characters.
When we first meet the troubled couple, they’re in the middle of a strained reunion. Suspicious that Eddie was cheating on her with a nameless countess, May decided to get away from Eddie and the trailer they share together.
She’d been holed up in the motel for some time, before Eddie showed up with a bottle of liquor and a plan to take her back.
May seems ambivalent. When Eddie eventually goes to her in the play’s opening scene, she falls to her knees and wraps her arms around his bean-pole legs like an anxious child.
“I’m staying right here,” he assures her. But the tender exchange is cut short when May’s suspicions bubble to the surface, causing her to fly into a rage.
“You’re either going to erase me, or have me erased,” she exclaims. The line is just one of a number of gems woven throughout the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s script.
Such is the pattern that May and Eddie seem trapped in, one that shifts among yearning, rage and distance in equal parts that bleed into one another.
The cyclical nature of their dynamic doesn’t make the show any less suspenseful. Quite the opposite, as though Shepard is training the audience to hold their breath should moments of passion become opportunities for vengeance, such as when May knees Eddie in the groin in the middle of a deep kiss.
Sarah Killough, whose past credits include Ginny in Broadway’s “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” plays May with a mixture of fragility and sturdiness. She seems more aware of her and Eddie’s dynamic than he is, and more determined to outrun it.
By the time Eddie catches up to her, she’s found a new job, and a date, the sweet, folksy Martin (Nick Sweetland), who was meant to pick her up from the motel the same night Eddie rolled into town.
Jacob A. Ware’s Eddie is his own kind of tornado. When he learns that Martin is on his way to fetch May, he grows erratic, leaning heavily on his cowboy bravado. I winced when, in a display of dominance and skill, he lassoes a flimsy metal chair, cinching it against the bed frame. The gesture reads as both an indication of the kind of hold Eddie has over May, and evidence of a man desperate to prove his might.
The show’s design elements add to the sense of unease. The walls of the motel room, the work of set designer Craig Mowery, end in exposed slats of wood like raw nerves poking out of a severed limb. And every time May or Eddie slam a door, an ominous clap of thunder reverberates through the theater, a striking detail on the part of sound designer Ben Montmagny.
Apart from Martin, another character shares the stage with May and Eddie: An old man, played by Mark S. Cartier, who occasionally fills a disposable cup with booze from his outpost in the shadows, beyond the perimeter of the motel.
His consanguineous ties to Eddie and May seems to be at the root of their suffering and why they just couldn’t seem to quit each other. The pattern they were in, we discover, as the couple recounts their halves of the story to a bewildered Martin, was stitched into their destiny long before they knew anything about it. Desire holds the pair together as much as shame.
By the play’s end, the needle has been reset, and Eddie and May are back to where they started, an expanse of distance widening between them.
There’s no relief from the messiness, and in that way, the play runs counter to the common structure of stories penned in the West, in which protagonists do battle with their demons and emerge victorious, or otherwise meet a tragic end.
May and Eddie’s demons are laid bare in “Fool for Love,” but Shepard seems less interested in presenting audiences with a redemptive arc, than in asking them to reckon with how, in some cases, that arc never materializes.
Shaker Bridge Theatre’s production “Fool for Love” runs through Feb. 8 in the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction. For tickets ($28-$48) and more information go to shakerbridgetheatre.org or call 802-281-6848.