Cursed and Charmed
As the American theatre approaches the tenth anniversary of the death of writer Sam Shepard, who died in 2017, productions of his plays have become grounds of investigation and not just commemoration. When an artist dies, their work is upheld as a beacon of some sort of truth about the time they lived and wrote in. Eight years on, those ideals may begin to be picked at. Shepard’s plays have been lauded for the last half-century as dioramas of the post-war American dream in all its worn glory. Two Chicago productions of his work, FOOL FOR LOVE, directed by Jeremy Herrin at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and A LIE OF THE MIND, directed for Raven Theatre by Azar Kazemi, approach Shepard’s lauded works with a critical eye, seeking new meaning in these canonical plays.
FOOL FOR LOVE, Shepard’s 1983 Pulitzer-finalist play, is essentially a two-hander that goes deep on the all-consuming lust shared by its two central characters, May and Eddie. Their reunion in a Mojave Desert motel is a deeply horny battle of wills as they throw themselves at and away from each other like dolls mashed together by a deranged, lovesick eight year-old. In Steppenwolf’s production, directed by British director Jeremy Herrin, the sense that May and Eddie, as played by Caroline Neff and Nick Gehlfuss, can’t control themselves is enhanced by Herrin’s extremely physical approach to Shepard’s conversational text. Todd Rosenthal’s set, resembling a bisected motel room diorama, allows the audience to peer in on May and Eddie. They’re bugs trapped under glass, and all the audience can do is observe their reunion.
May and Eddie’s relationship is, unfortunately for them, a more complex than two bad exes who can’t shake each other. Their reunion is interrupted by The Old Man, who sits in a rocking chair nearby, drinking and speaking to Eddie. We come to learn that this figure, as played by Tim Hopper, is Eddie’s father, an archetypal, inconstant cowboy type. Their relationship becomes clear via these asides, a sort of Southwestern Hamlet’s Ghost situation. When he finally breaks through to May, however, the bottom drops out.
He is – spoiler alert– also her father. The lovers come from different mothers, and they met as teenagers as a consequence of her mother’s dogged pursuit of The Old Man. Since their first meeting, they’ve been inextricably tied to each other, even as Eddie emulates his father’s wandering and May tries to escape her obsession. Eddie’s arrival brings with it The Old Man, whose callousness led to May’s mother’s suicide.
The Old Man’s denial of his own philandering, and as a result of May and Eddie’s incestuous relationship, efficiently critiques the institution of the American patriarch and all its tropes. He claims not to see himself in either of his children, and urges Eddie in the play’s climax to force May “around to our side” in telling the story of their family. Shepard’s plays are filled with avoidant, ineffectual patriarchs who still demand respect based on their status as an elder man. The Old Man’s denial and gaslighting in this classic Western diorama, critiques the ways that powerful men avoid responsibility for their actions. As the hotel’s parking lot is engulfed in flames, May and Eddie embrace and The Old Man despairs. His children are caught in a cycle of his making, and he must disappear once more.
Herrin’s production emphasizes the ghostliness of the setting, with massive power lines, a larger-than-life motel sign and heavy reverb on the many doors slammed in the motel room. This unreality is reflected in The Old Man’s presence in the production. When he steps into the room from his side-stage pedestal, the lights flicker like in a horror film. May and Eddie are haunted by the hole that their father has left in their lives, and they collide in the hopes that they can fill the void.
Where lust is the motivator for the entanglements of FOOL FOR LOVE, Shepard’s A LIE OF THE MIND explores violence in the nuclear family. In Raven Theatre’s production of Shepard’s 1985 follow-up to FOOL FOR LOVE, director Azar Kazemi and her excellent ensemble explore the cruelty of the American dream by casting MENA actors as one of the two families at the play’s center. Jake (Ian Maryfield), an impulsive, possibly manic young man, calls his brother Frankie (John Drea) in the middle of the night, claiming that he has killed his wife, Beth (Gloria Imseih Petrelli), an actress. We come to learn that Jake has beaten Beth in “retaliation” for his paranoid belief that she is sleeping with her co-star. Beth is alive, however, taken in by her family in Montana after a stint in the hospital.
Beth’s post-beating cognition, halting and aphasic, is truer and more incisive than anything another character says. Through her fragmentation, she waxes poetic on the meaning and responsibilities of love. This fragmentation is reflected in Lauren M. Nichols’ set, which suggests pieces of a family home, with the roots of a tree in the house’s crawl space. The two families, this set suggests, are not whole, and the reason for this is clear.
Male violence permeates A LIE OF THE MIND. Jake’s savage beating of Beth is one example, but the play is also full of frontier and hunting imagery and the violence of war, and a particularly gruesome roadside death is recounted in detail. The ways that violence is passed down and nurtured in the nuclear family is the focus of Shepard’s drama here.
Jake’s mother Lorraine (Meighan Gerachis), a prototypical #boymom, waves away his violent tendencies and misogynistically suggests that Beth is the problem in the marriage, rather than Jake who nearly beat her to death. Jake’s deceased father is implied to have been incredibly abusive toward his wife and daughter, Sally (Jocelyn Maher), who also bears the brunt of her brother’s violent behavior. Through these references to the father’s violence, we understand that the manic man-child, jumping on his bed in his boxers, draped in the American flag, is not a singular figure. He is part of his family’s tradition of violence which goes back further than we could imagine.
Beth’s family, meanwhile, has its own relationship with violence. Baylor (Rom Barkhordar), her father, is a hunter and a rancher with a short fuse, blowing up at his wife Meg (Joan Nahid) when she doesn’t anticipate his every need. Beth’s brother, Mike (Arash Fakhrabardi), is polite yet revenge-minded. Within Kazemi’s culturally conscious casting of Beth’s family is the meaningful choice to have Meg, as played by Nahid, speak with an Iranian accent. The conflicts within the family become even more complicated when Baylor is read as assimilated – and he is, decked out in Western wear – and Meg as a more recent emigrant. While Meg is perhaps slightly daffy when played by a white American actress, Nahid’s performance is imbued with a certain sense of unease regarding how Baylor controls the family.
With A LIE OF THE MIND, Shepard critiques the seriousness with which Americans regard the American dream and the promise of the nuclear family. At the play’s climax, Jake arrives at Beth’s family home, and leaves as soon as he sees that she’s still alive, departing without his flag. Baylor insists in that moment on teaching Meg how to properly fold the flag, the first time he is seen doing anything on his own in the household. By virtue of Nahid and Barkhordar’s casting, this moment is heavy with meaning. Where Shepard’s text draws a straight line between patriarchy and nationalism, two MENA actors folding the flag representing so much of the carnage brought on the Middle East is chilling, particularly against the play’s backdrop of violence.
The two productions’ approaches to Shepard’s plays succeed by following the path that his writing lays out. FOOL FOR LOVE’s dialogue is conversational, a gesture towards what two lovers may sound like, so Rosenthal’s set is a painstakingly detailed reproduction of a dusty motel. A LIE OF THE MIND is jagged and poetic, reflective of Beth’s brain rebuilding itself after trauma, so Nichols’ set is far from literal. It’s also worth noting the economic differences at play between Steppenwolf, regional juggernaut that it is, and Raven, a storefront theater.
In conversation with each other, these productions of FOOL FOR LOVE and A LIE OF THE MIND make for an excellent comparison game. May and Eddie in FOOL FOR LOVE are magnetically attracted to each other and say exactly what they mean. The problem is that their counterpart refuses to take them at their word, as evidenced by their mutual inability to either commit or walk away. A LIE OF THE MIND, meanwhile, is full of conversations that seem to float past their characters’ perception. Despite being built around Jake and Beth’s story, the conflicts of both families weave together in the play. Meanwhile, FOOL FOR LOVE is essentially a duet between May and Eddie as external characters attempt to interject. Where FOOL FOR LOVE is a direct, furious one-act, A LIE OF THE MIND is a hazy and complex three-act play. This study of contrasts, enabled by the excellent interpretive powers of Kazemi, Herrin, and their respective creative teams, is a testament to just how durable Shepard’s work is. Steppenwolf and Raven have both used these productions as opportunities to present the lasting ideas in Shepard’s writing and not just superficially celebrate Shepard as a cultural figure.
Shepard’s poetic deconstruction of the American project is useful as corporate capitalism rears its ugly head and open fascists win the nation’s affections. There is nothing new about the lust for power and penchant for violence that runs America in 2025. Those tendencies existed in the previous administration, and made themselves known in all iterations of American leadership. Shepard’s characters are all attached to a notion of survival, whether in the nuclear family or on their own, that is unattainable in reality. Their interpersonal relationships, failing spectacularly, are the ultimate manifestation of this inability to survive.
In the introduction to their landmark book CRUEL OPTIMISM, cultural theorist Lauren Berlant writes that “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might [be]… a kind of love [or] a fantasy of the good life”. The cruelty comes into play “when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes” progress. Shepard’s characters are stuck, whether they are aware of it or not. Their devotion to upholding the norms of American independence or the nuclear family are destroying them and those around them. Raven’s production of A LIE OF THE MIND and Steppenwolf’s production of FOOL FOR LOVE are opportunities for the ideas behind Shepard’s plays to make themselves heard. As his legacy continues to grow after his death, we can only hope that theaters continue to stage his work not as museum pieces, but as scaffolds for experimentation.
