Fool For Love - Chris Piatt

Chris Piatt, TimeOut Chicago

"What is it about the musty basement of Wicker Park's Chopin Theatre that brings out the best work of storefront designers? The small cattywampus space, blocked in several places by ungainly, reinforcing pillars and limited in its technical capacity, should be impossible to work within. Yet we?d need more than two hands to count the number of one-of-a-kind theater experiences we've had there.

Sam Shepard's Fool for Love is a play so frequently remounted that to recount at length its plot (two irreconcilable lovers are trapped in a desert motel room) and themes (turns out they're siblings) is to imply that it needs revisiting. Because it doesn't, and because only one of the four performances here stands out in an otherwise serviceable revival that reveals nothing new about the text, it's not an event that would normally have any staying power. Yet Melania Lancy's ratty fleabag set?a narrow sliver of a dump with audience members seated on either end?and Julie E. Ballard's dusky lighting make it into something intimate, haunting and, most crucially, harder to shake off than other Fools you've suffered.

Director Marra's biggest accomplishments are bringing the proceedings in at exactly one hour, which makes Shepard's occasionally hollow poetry easier to swallow, and keeping the violence, which in other productions can go to apeshit extremes, relatively contained. (Marra drafted Chicago Shakespeare's stage combat expert Kevin Asselin to guide the closely quartered brutality.) The show basically belongs to Snook, a yeoman character actor who rarely gets to play the rugged leading man, but even a performance this strong wouldn't look as good in a regular old motel room". Chris Piatt, 8/9/07