Shock value gone from Fool For Love

Celebrity casting certainly worked for Shadow Theatre’s celebratory 20th anniversary production.

Sam Shepard’s mythic play, Fool For Love, is playing at Varscona Theatre until Sunday, March 4 and the one big draw is CBC Heartland’s Shaun Johnson as the ghostly Old Man.

Now it’s probably not a huge stretch for Johnson, who moves from playing the beloved patriarch of a ranching family, to a rodeo rider who divided his time between two families.

He’s so dang likeable as the spectral boozing father, a man who can’t face the reality of all the pain he caused because of his own weaknesses. In some ways he symbolizes the Old West – a figure that never really existed but continues to thrive in our romantic notions of the past.

But the play really belongs to Eddie (David MacInnis) and May (Jamie Konchak), two half siblings who had an affair before learning they shared the same father.

Directed by John Hudson, this play is set in a seedy motel at the edge of California’s Mojave Desert. Eddie, a rodeo stuntman, has just driven 2,480 miles to rekindle his relationship with May and take her to Wyoming. She’s got a job as a short order cook and says she wants him out of her life.

Fifteen years into their on-and-off affair, they are still torn between love and hate, lust and disgust. And in this bruising one-hour production, the actors are required to spill all their guts on stage.

It’s an extremely physical production as the duo yells and screams, blocks each other’s path and throws each other on the floor. May is desperately jealous of Eddie’s other women, especially the mysterious countess, and Konchak is quite tempestuous. She’s a woman who has been bruised by those she loves and is hurting badly.

Eddie, on the other hand, is the classic chauvinist pig, a man who doesn’t hesitate to belittle either sex as long as he gets what he wants. MacInnis plays Eddie with full-throttle vengeance, a man terrified he may lose what he cherishes most.

This is a play that demands a strong sexual chemistry between the two leads and the blunt thrill of danger. From the moment, Eddie pulls out his rifle to clean it, there are unspoken threats in the air. But although Konchak and MacInnis are great eye-candy, their sexual chemistry somehow gets buried in layers of angry unfinished business.

Neither Eddie nor May end up being particularly likeable and at times you can’t help but think they deserve each other.

When Shepard wrote Fool for Love in 1984, incestuous passion between a half-brother and sister offered a high degree of shock value. What better way to salute the vanishing Old West and suggest America was unable to confront its own reality. Now, however, the shock value is gone and that leaves an unfilled void.