‘Fool for Love,’ a Kinship That Breaks Hearts and Knuckles
Ben BrantleyOctober 8, 2015: They never stop moving in the same circle, as one of them observes, sounding angry and doomed. Their end is evident in their beginnings, and vice versa. You know where they’re headed as well as they do. Yet as May and Eddie perform the savage, cyclical dance that is Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love,” which opened in a breathtaking production on Thursday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, you feel the gut-clutching suspense generated by a full-throttle cliffhanger. After all, odds are you’ve been on the edge of this particular cliff yourself, terrified and elated and wondering if you’re really going to jump. Love as a battlefield on which nobody wins has seldom been mapped as thrillingly as it is in Daniel Aukin’s definitive revival of this bruising drama from 1983. That’s in large part because as the inexorably coupled May and Eddie, Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell exude the sort of chemistry from which nuclear meltdowns are made.
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