To Attract and Repel, in Perpetuity Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell Star in ‘Fool for Love’
Ben BrantleyJuly 28, 2014: Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell must have gotten to know each other real well, real fast this summer. If their impossible mission was to achieve an instant, unfathomable intimacy, that assignment has been more than fulfilled in Daniel Aukin’s knockout production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, which runs through Saturday at the Williamstown Theater Festival here. Playing a man and a woman who spend their lives running away from, and straight toward, each other in this 75-minute, 31-year-old drama, Mr. Rockwell and Ms. Arianda project a mutual understanding that stings like a cut that won’t scab. Such dangerous awareness is found only among members of the same mortal family or longtime lovers. Imagine what it means if, like May and Eddie in Fool, you happen to be both. Ms. Arianda and Mr. Rockwell were cast in their roles barely a month ago, after the show’s original stars, Lauren Ambrose and Chris Pine, dropped out. Sometimes urgency is the soul of theater, and perhaps limited rehearsal time worked to the advantage of a play that is, as the script dictates, to be “performed relentlessly without a break.”
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