Theater Review: Gularte, Williams sizzle in 'Fool for Love'

Sam Shepard's best plays occupy mystical self-contained territories. Obliquely referencing America's ramshackle new West in images we recognize from songs, films and even billboards, Shepard turns the impressions inside out. But Shepard also makes the ether of these familiar ideas into visceral drama with blood and guts characters.

His rowdy 1983 romance "Fool for Love" plays out in a cheap motel which feels like the Mojave Desert but could be anywhere in the Southwest. It also feels like the edge nowhere in Capital Stage's bracing new production, directed with a knowing hand by Janis Stevens.

The sparely furnished blue-walled room is the perfect place for former lovers Eddie and May to bludgeon each other through another chapter of the emotional slugfest which is their relationship. It's a motel room that might as well be a boxing ring, the way these two go after each other.

Delivering essential gutsy performances, Jonathan Williams and Stephanie Gularte are the brassy, intimate and vulnerable love-drunk couple mysteriously bound to one another.

Williams and Gularte skillfully negotiate their blunt characters' natural physicality and intuitive passions. The performances are gritty but there's nothing gratuitous in their portrayals of the classic couple who can't live together and can't live apart.

Director Stevens effectively modulates the cryptic myths Shepard embodies in these two and the occasional absurdity his writing also features. The production maintains its own seductive rhythms and form, while Stevens also creates memorable visual compositions on the appropriately claustrophobic set.

There's not a lot of plot in this story and Shepard eventually disrupts the narrative with a digression from Eddie's past that feels extraneous. But Williams and Gularte don't let loose the grip they place on these characters, and our interest never wavers. Stalking each other around the little room, Eddie and May are not particularly reflective but they do get to talking. They tell stories about themselves, about each other; some the stories might even be true, but what matters most is they truly believe what they're saying.

The two adjunct characters are particularly well defined elements, adding necessary layers to the production. Loren Taylor as the Old Man has a canny sensibility which makes his character's constant presence, as a voice in Eddie's head, a quirky asset.

David Campfield's deep, sonorous tones and angular, expressive face give his earnest Martin, an unwitting player in Eddie and May's drama, a moving, quiet depth.

Much of what happens in the tense 85-minute play is open to interpretation. What we do know from this intensely entertaining revival is Eddie and May will always burn for each other and always eventually track each other down.

About the writer:

• Call Bee theater critic Marcus Crowder, (916) 321-1120. Read his blog postings at www.sacbee.com/21q.