No Fooling Around
Mockingbird Theatre makes fine work of Sam Shepard’s offbeat classic Fool for Love
by Martin Brady
Fool for Love
Presented by Mockingbird Theatre
Through Oct. 18 at TPAC’s Johnson Theater
David Alford enjoys a stellar reputation as one of Nashville’s finest actors. Besides maintaining a track record of solid stage work, he’s also made a few notable appearances in PBS and feature films. If Nashville’s got a marquee actor, then I suppose Alford is it. In his recent work on Nashville stages—in Of Mice and Men, The Glass Menagerie and Betrayal—he has plied his quietly confident talents to acceptably good if unspectacular effect. Which makes the observer yearn to see him venture out somewhere toward the edge, lest his performances seem a little too pat. Alford remedies this situation some in the new Mockingbird Theatre production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, which opened last weekend at TPAC’s Johnson Theater under the direction of Jeremy Childs.
As the scruffy, bedraggled, gun-toting, lariat-wielding, tequila-swilling latter-day cowboy Eddie, Alford etches out a compelling characterization filled with wild swings of behavior and an ominous kind of playfulness that only a fascinating Shepard script can evoke. So Shepard gets his “props,” of course—as presented by Mockingbird, the play is a 90-minute feast of entertaining perplexity—but so do Alford and castmates Jenny Littleton, Buddy Raper and Josh Childs (the director’s brother), who all thrive under the elder Childs’ thoughtful staging.
Shepard has had a fabulous career as a playwright, mining the underbelly of the American mind and character with twisted glee for about 30 years. He relishes exposing his audience to oddball and unlikely characters, who often turn up in seemingly ordinary locales yet, by evening’s end, take on some kind of mythic quality. Set in a squalid motel room near the Mojave desert, Fool for Love is no different. What at first seems to be a portrait of a low-rent domestic squabble evolves into indelibly deep point-counterpoint debate on corrupt familial relationships, with incest and suicide rearing their ugly heads.
Absurdity abounds in the early going, and when erstwhile paramours Alford and Littleton square off in an extended lovers’ spat, the action is lively, satisfyingly physical and also quirkily humorous, as only Shepard dialogue can allow things to be. Alford works his character’s tyrannical magnetism to compelling effect, holding sway over girlfriend May (Littleton) and her date for the evening, Martin (Childs). Sitting ominously downstage left is The Old Man (Raper), who occasionally offers iconoclastic interludes of monologue, which function not unlike a Greek chorus.
Childs’ direction is swift and sure-handed, and there is nary a moment when the audience isn’t anticipating the next surprise in deed or word. Littleton proves to be Alford’s equal in emotional intensity, and Josh Childs acquits himself very nicely as the dumbfounded interloper who ends up wishing maybe he’d rather be somewhere else. Raper is excellent as well; while his contributions are only intermittent, they seethe with Shepardian vibrancy, like the voice of the author himself emanating from a dissipated skid-row oracle.
Most gratifying is the company’s handling of the Shepard vocabulary, which conjures up images of a bygone American landscape. Only in Shepard do we savor the references to Studebakers and Barbara Mandrell, or bemusedly experience colorful words and colloquialisms.
While this production may not be for audiences who prefer sedate, conventional fare, there is no question that Mockingbird, now celebrating its 10th year, has served up a first-rate version of a modern offbeat classic. Fool for Love represents a progressive step in the right direction for an esteemed program that needs to continue to push the boundaries of the dramatic envelope.
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