Fool for Love
- ISBN-10
- 0872861511
- ISBN-13
- 9780872861510
- Series
- Fool for Love
- Pages
- 112
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1983
- Publisher
- City Lights Books
- Author
- Sam Shepard
Description
The "fools" in the play are battling lovers at a Mojave Desert motel. May is hiding out at said motel when an old childhood friend and old flame, Eddie, shows up. Eddie tries to convince May to come back home with him and live in the trailer on the farm they always wanted to buy. May refuses because she has started a new life and knows that if she goes back to Eddie their relationship will repeat the same destructive cycle it has before. Throughout the play the character of the Old Man -- the father of both lovers -- is present and talks to each of the other two characters. It is revealed that the Old Man had led a double life, abandoning each family for different parts of each child's life. The two became lovers in their high school years and when their parents finally figured out what had occurred Eddie's mother shot May's mother. May is afraid that Eddie has begun to emulate his father; taking to drinking and secretly seeing a woman May refers to as the Countess. The play centers around the drama of the confrontation rather than a plot with a rising and falling action. In the end the two lovers have not reconciled, the Old Man begins to lose himself to his own delusions, and a stranger is left on stage to observe it all.
