Fool for Love & the Sad Lament of Pecos Bill

by Sam Shepard

Book Overview

In Fool For Love, situated at a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert, transient lovers May and Eddie spin around in a room in a relentless struggle for power and truth. Through recollections and dreams, multiple versions of a fierce and fatal love story are told.

The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife, another kind of love story in the form of a comic operetta, takes a distaff view of the Southwest's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872861503
• ISBN13: 9780872861503
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 114 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.4" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Great value

This script was needed by my son in a hurry, and I got it super fast. He was very happy with it, and I was very happy with the price and speed of shipping. Fantastic play, by the say.

Illusion and Reality

In Fool for Love , Sam Shepard analyzes the complicated relationship between May and Eddie who are involved in a love-hate, fascination-repulsion 15-year-long relation which is once more in the `on again' phase. Set in a low-budget motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, May and Eddie play out an unpredictable encounter. Traveling close to 2,500 miles to come back into her life, Eddie attempts to once again declare his faithfulness and commitment to the unconvinced May, who tells him: "You gotta give this up. You've been jerking me off like this for fifteen years. Fifteen years, I've been a yo-yo for you". May screams for Eddie to leave yet pleads for him to stay upon his repeated exits. Through their arguing, the chemistry and history the two have shared becomes apparent and it is obvious that the characters are deeply in love. "We've got a pact...we've made a pact", Eddie said to May. "You know we're connected, May. We will always be connected...that was decided a long time ago", he added. A bottle of tequila blends the couple's arguing into the narration of a story that deepens on May and Eddie's past revealing how the two were already completely in love when the truth was learned about their true relationship. At this point of the play, Shepard had gotten illusion and reality finely combined that it takes a while to understand that the Old Man observing, and occasionally interacting with the characters, is just their distant father's ghost. Shepard has done an amazing job in this play managing illusory conversations naturally flow within the real ones. May and Eddie seem to have both independent and joined conversations with the Old Man. A fourth character, Martin comes into the story, as the shy, naive date of May to reminds us that the conversation between the protagonists is "real". As Eddie, now drunk, continues his story of how he came to know May, the old man yells for him to stop the story, but ends up discovering facts of his own past as well -- which confused me since his presence is not real but illusory only. The fact that at the end of the play, the motel gets burned down by Eddie's mistress, -- as May refers to her -- May is forced to move away again, suggesting us that the vicious cycle in which the characters live, will be repeated once again following what Eddie once told May: "You'll never get rid of me. I'll track you down no matter where you go".

Fool For Love

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results. We learn of Eddie, Mae, their father, and a "Man" (Martin) coming for a date blind to the status of the relationship of his date and her brother and their father. I am a Senior at Lindenwood University in St. Charles Missouri, double majoring in Theatre and Mass Communications. This April, I will be directing "Fool For Love" as my senior project. This play, as analyzed in a previous modern drama class and in my current working analysis, is highly identifiable with anyone who has ever been involved in a severely dysfunctional relationship that won't go away. Mr. Shepard creates four intricate and powerful characters sharing both realistic and ethereal existances.