Mikhail Fiksel — PicksInSix® Theater Review — CONVERSATIONS with Ed Tracy

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PicksInSix Review: Fool for Love - Steppenwolf Theatre Company

 
 

Searing ‘Fool for Love’ At Steppenwolf
PicksInSix Review | Guest Contributor Ronald Keaton

The great Sam Shepard play “Fool for Love,” now playing at Steppenwolf Theatre through March 23, was written in the middle of a quality string of highly volatile, verbally explosive plays about family that he penned in an eight-year period between 1977 and 1985. including “Buried Child” (which won Mr. Shepard his Pulitzer Prize in 1979) and “True West”(which had a legendary Steppenwolf production). In 1984, “Fool for Love” was itself nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and purportedly was written after the playwright’s divorce from his first wife, resulting in a outpouring of personal, emotional fallout that produced this searing piece of theatre.

Make no mistake—the play itself is the star.  May and Eddie are star-crossed lovers who meet yet again in a motel out in the Mojave Desert. There is a taut, difficult dynamic between these two that produces a dreaded secret to face. Sitting outside the motel is the otherworldly spirit of The Old Man, whose influence on this relationship is both relentless and disturbing, because of that secret that no one wishes to discuss.

May (played by Caroline Neff, at once both feisty and vulnerable) has been abandoned by Eddie (Nick Gehlfuss as the brawling rodeo star) one too many times. She wants nothing to do with him and repeatedly demands that he leave.  Yet when he actually threatens to leave, May is suddenly a child-like being, afraid of being left alone. The dichotomy here produces a quite visceral and intense piece of theatre narrative. Eddie feels the need to dominate the proceedings, and even the history between them, as if they would tell two different stories. May bucks right back, reminding him of his endless disloyalty. And the story of their shared lives is unique and shocking.

So May has a date that was planned before Eddie’s arrival. Enter Martin (Cliff Chamberlain, who offers fine comic relief as a bumbling suitor) into the fray. Talk about a fish out of water. Martin is so innocent and shy that his initial exchange with Eddie turns into a kind of staggering fascination as to what kind of man this rodeo guy really is. And Martin is totally drawn into the tale that Eddie tells about his youth, meeting May and discovering a guise of love that he’d never witnessed, let alone felt before. By now, May has come out of the bathroom, having listened through the door at all of Eddie’s story and wanting to immediately correct him on the facts of the matter.

Finally, the Old Man (the appropriately craggy Tim Hopper in an almost Big Daddy guise), whose stance throughout has been to inject his own brutal viewpoint onto the story, finally awakens his ghostly aura, manifesting at last into a genuine voice to Eddie, almost begging him to “tell the truth and represent me.” If a viewer has never seen this play, this writer will spare you the tawdry details of what happens at the end. Suffice it to say that at the time of its writing, “Fool for Love” was a staggering example of “the sins of the father” that Mr. Shepard so comfortably shares here.

Coming from the recent Broadway debut of the stage version of John LeCarre’s novel “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold” is the English director Jeremy Herrin. Todd Rosenthal produces a dependable set design in a seedy motel, complete with neon sign above. Heather Gilbert shows a lighting design with “on-fire” effects shooting into the room from outside visitors. Mikhail Fiksel offers shots and explosions onto Eddie’s truck from those same visitors, as well as the occasional George Strait melody in his sound design.  It’s a short play at roughly 65 minutes or so, but one will find that hour full of passion and a fury all its own.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR | RONALD KEATON received an Equity Jeff Award for the performance of his one-man show CHURCHILL. www.solochicagotheatre.com  Coming soon, his new solo play “Echo Holler.” www.echoholler.com

PHOTO | Michael Brosilow

Steppenwolf Theatre Company
presents
Fool for Love
1650 N. Halsted St.
(312) 335-1650
through March 23, 2025

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PicksInSix Review: Little Bear Ridge Road - Steppenwolf Theatre Company

 
 

METCALF IN MESMERIZING RETURN AT STEPPENWOLF
PicksInSix® Review | Ed Tracy

Samuel D. Hunter’s brilliant new play “Little Bear Ridge Road” now enjoying an extended world premiere run at Steppenwolf’s Downstairs Theater might not have ever happened if Tony Award winning director Joe Mantello and iconic Steppenwolf Ensemble member Laurie Metcalf had not approached Hunter to develop a project for Metcalf.  

That was a little more than a year ago and the resulting work traces the reemerging relationship between Metcalf’s irascible character Sarah and her gay nephew Ethan (Micah Stock), the last surviving members of the Fernsby family who are navigating the aftermath of the death of Ethan’s estranged father. Ethan has arrived on Sarah’s doorstep near Moscow, Idaho with little more than a writing degree and the wherewithal to rent a hotel room for a few days let alone the weeks he would need to settle his father’s estate. Sarah lives a private, secluded life alone on Little Bear Ridge Road, her 40 year nursing career shrinking to three shifts a week and is not at all excited that Ethan may now be her house guest for an undetermined period of time.

Things move quickly in conversations between the two, exposing Sarah’s unbridled opinions and hilariously mundane lifestyle, Ethan’s conflicted relationship with his father in the years prior to his death and his own disheveled personal life and uncertain future. The combination of Metcalf and Stock, with Mantello’s expertly paced direction, allow the series of crisp early scenes of Hunter’s script to seamlessly define both characters.  As time passes, Ethan ventures out to a bar and hooks up with James (a rock solid performance by John Drea), who sees some potential in a relationship, but wants to slow things down at first. As that relationship takes shape, James finds himself in a revealing conversation with Sarah. Details about Sarah’s health challenges emerge, which have the two-fold effect of bringing the two men closer together and shifting the dynamics of the drama in Sarah’s direction.

Hunter’s writing is clever, succinct and punctuated by Metcalf’s marvelous presence on stage. Even as we revel in the robust early comic interaction of the play, it is the dramatic turn of the piece that elevates this drama, exemplifies Hunter’s exceptional storytelling ability and exposes the emotional core of the piece.

The elegant, stylized stage design by Scott Pask is set with a home theater seating unit that revolves to suggest alternate scenes. There is a lone ceiling fan above and an expansive, circular stage floor all enhanced by Heather Gilbert’s lighting design and Mikhail Fiksel’s sound design. The look of this show is clean, simple and amazingly effective.

Over the course of ninety minutes, Metcalf is a mesmerizing force on stage and a joy to watch, her flawless, wide range of comic timing and dramatic sensibilities on full display. Stock plays Ethan with a fragile, measured intensity that emerges in a definitive scene with Drea and then becomes unhinged in a stunning definitive confrontation with Metcalf. And when Meighan Gerachis appears in a brief but powerful and satisfying coda to the drama, we are left to ponder the importance of making choices that look forward with hope rather than backward with regret.

PHOTO|Michael Brosilow

STEPPENWOLF THEATRE COMPANY

Presents

WORLD PREMIERE

LITTLE BEAR BRIDGE ROAD
Downstairs Theater
1650 N. Halsted
Extended
through August 4, 2024

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