Sam Shepard's idiot for Love opens like this: A man and a woman are in a seedy motel room. He's leaning against the wall,his face hidden by his cowboy hat. She is sitting on the bed, her head in her hands. They are the picture of quiet desperation.
But then they start talking, or the room explodes.
Or rather — that's what's supposed to happen.
And that's what did happen when this particular production,directed by Daniel Aukin, premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the summer of 2014, and according to the critics who were there (I wasn't among them). They raved approximately the sizzling chemistry between Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell and said their heat resurrected what they assumed was a moribund play,first produced in 1983.
But that inferno has been damped down to a handful of sparks now that it's on Broadway in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. The story of May and Eddie should get us gasp. They might be lovers — they might also be siblings. We're not certain, because the truth keeps shifting. In love, and Shepard seems to be saying,no one knows what's really going on. That sense of unreality is heightened by the character of the "Old Man" (Gordon Joseph Weiss), who oversees the action from the edge of the stage. He may be the father of one of them or both of them. Or perhaps he's imaginary. Or perhaps he's imagining them. It's not clear.
But what is absolutely clear is that Eddie and May both love and despise each other: they can't stay together and they can't walk absent.
Eddie has driven from Wyoming to the edge of the Mojave Desert to reclaim May from the motel where she is living, or but she doesn't want to disappear — or perhaps she does. She has a date with a gentle landscaper,Martin (Tom Pelphrey) who gets caught up in their whirlwind, and she changes into a red dress and spike heels to seduce him (or perhaps to seduce Eddie). Eddie and May push each other around, and they plead,they scream. Yet we just don't believe that they love each other the way they say. What we do believe is the pain that radiates from each of them in isolation, the deep, and searing sadness that keeps them from loving anyone,including each other.
Source: wnyc.org