"What is it about the musty basement of Wicker Park’s Chopin Theatre that brings out the best work of storefront designers? The small cattywampus space, blocked in several places by ungainly, reinforcing pillars and limited in its technical capacity, should be impossible to work within. Yet we’d need more than two hands to count the number of one-of-a-kind theater experiences we’ve had there. Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love is a play so frequently remounted that to recount at length its plot (two irreconcilable lovers are trapped in a desert motel room) and themes (turns out they’re siblings) is to imply that it needs revisiting. Because it doesn’t, and because only one of the four performances here stands out in an otherwise serviceable revival that reveals nothing new about the text, it’s not an event that would normally have any staying power. Yet Melania Lancy’s ratty fleabag set—a narrow sliver of a dump with audience members seated on either end—and Julie E. Ballard’s dusky lighting make it into something intimate, haunting and, most crucially, harder to shake off than other Fools you’ve suffered. Director Marra’s biggest accomplishments are bringing the proceedings in at exactly one hour, which makes Shepard’s occasionally hollow poetry easier to swallow, and keeping the violence, which in other productions can go to apeshit extremes, relatively contained. (Marra drafted Chicago Shakespeare’s stage combat expert Kevin Asselin to guide the closely quartered brutality.) The show basically belongs to Snook, a yeoman character actor who rarely gets to play the rugged leading man, but even a performance this strong wouldn’t look as good in a regular old motel room" - Chris Piatt, TimeOut Chicago 8/9/07

"Hotels and motels, with their boxy confines, have never been kind to mismatched lovers. As rendered on stage, these couples might as well be cell mates as much as bedmates -- unable to live together, or apart. Eventually they will flee their rooms-for-rent, but they can never escape each other. Nor do they want to. The stage is set for the combustible romance in Sam Shepard’s "Fool for Love," from 1982, now in a knockout staging from Signal Ensemble at Chopin Theatre. Shepard has never been particularly interested in urbanites. Or suburbanites, for that matter. His characters live on the fringe, and in "Fool for Love" that setting is literal: a motel room located on the edge of the Mojave Desert. This is where May (a wonderfully unpredictable Simone Roos) and Eddie (Aaron Snook, as a Marlboro Man in search of a horizon) find themselves in a turbulent reunion, or what the critic Frank Rich called an "indoor rodeo." They’ve been at this game for 15 years now, but their inharmoniousness goes deeper than bickering or jealousy. They are also, inconveniently, brother and sister. Actually, half -- they share the same father, a grizzled old dude who appears as a ghostly presence (Tom Lally, in a crumpled cowboy hat) haunting these two lost souls. Abandonment is a constant theme here. Both Roos and Snook have just the right down-at-the-heels sex appeal. You can see why May, drunk on tequila and hormones, might bed down with Eddie -- only to wake up the next morning, hung over and regretting the whole thing. And while Eddie is certainly a brooding loser, he is not without a rough sort of allure. A man with a fetish for his lover’s neck can’t be all bad" - Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune 8/10/07

"The story in Sam Shepard’s play is already under way when we arrive at it, not unlike the drive-in movie our lovesick hero remembers glimpsing from a faraway field on the night that would change his life. As the curtain rises, we discover Eddie, a broken-down rodeo cowboy, in pursuit of his beloved May, a honky-tonk angel with decidedly ambivalent feelings toward her obsessed swain. As they waffle between come-hither and go-yonder in the motel room to which May has fled, the ghost of the runaway father they share materializes to reaffirm his hold over both their destinies. Oh, and a mysterious driver, who might be Eddie’s most recent ex-girlfriend, trashes his truck while May’s latest would-be suitor looks on in horrified fascination. So what is Shepard trying to tell us? That sparse rural populations lead to gene-crossed lovers? That philandering dads are selfish sonsabitches whose children are doomed to repeat their progenitor’s misdeeds for all eternity? That love makes helpless slaves of everybody? And are Eddie and May really related, or is this a confabulation that they, themselves, have set up as a romantic obstacle to a boring happy-ever-after? Conversely, is their very attraction predicated on the forbidden thrills suggested by incest? Is this whole damn yarn simply a pastiche of every country & western song ever written? Audiences in 2007 are as free to draw their own conclusions as they were when Fool For Love premiered in 1983. “This play is to be performed relentlessly without a break,” Shepard exhorts in the first words of his script. Signal Ensemble director Ronan Marra takes the author at his word, as does a tightly-focused cast led by Aaron Snook and Simone Roos as the hopelessly-entwined sweethearts ( with Tom Lally, playing the spectral paterfamilias, generating a menacing presence ) . Melania Lancy’s scenic design encapsulates shabby motor-court decor right down to the algae-green shower curtain; Anthony Ingram’s sound design resurrects such venerable careless-love classics as Why, Baby, Why?; Laura M. Dana’s costumes reflect the sun-baked textures of Shepard’s southwestern desert regions; and Julie E. Ballard’s nimble split-second lighting effects hit every mark mandated by the enigmatic text. Taken together, these elements work to deliver a coherent clutter-free production bringing the action home in a robust, riveting and, yes, “relentless” 50 minutes without a second wasted" - Mary Shen Barnridge, Windy City Times 08/07

"Two thousand, four hundred eighty miles is a long way to go to pick a scab. But Eddie does it, driving four days across the Mojave Desert to track down his sometime lover May, who has left him to hole up at a no-tell motel. An equal partner in their mutual destruction, May irritates the sore by alternately pushing him away and begging him to stay. The fools in love in Sam Shepard’s "Fool for Love," Eddie and May claw and cling, inflicting on each other wounds that never heal. Not everyone has scars that deep. Not everyone has romantic obsessions that consuming. But who among us hasn’t been enthralled with someone we cannot keep and cannot bear to release? Shepard evokes the paradox in "Fool for Love," a taut, foreboding drama about impossible love, sexual attraction, betrayal, abandonment, fractured families and the lies people tell themselves to go on living (and loving). Signal’s brisk production delivers everything you expect in a Shepard play - unvarnished lyricism, stripped-down dialogue, dark humor and a touch of the surreal - in condensed form. The stage directions indicate the play be performed relentlessly. Signal Ensemble Theatre follows them to the letter with director Ronan Marra’s streamlined revival running less than an hour. Lean and unfussy, it’s an immensely satisfying dose of Shepard thanks to Marra, who doesn’t let emotion overrun this highly charged show. In a play where dialogue passes as duets and monologues play like arias, from the early crescendo to the melancholy coda, the notes Signal sounds ring true. What’s more, Marra tones down the menace and plays up the world-weary desperation surrounding the on-again, off-again romance between broken-down stuntman Eddie (a shrewd, sincere performance by Aaron Snook) and cook May (Simone Roos, revealing a tough core beneath a vulnerable exterior). Passion, guilt and jealousy underscore their tempestuous, 15-year affair consisting of vicious fights followed by fervent reconciliations. The latest occurs within the gray-green walls of set designer Melania Lancy’s appropriately confining cut-rate motel room whose faded curtains and threadbare rug fail to lighten the grim mood or remove the sense of entrapment Marra emphasizes by having the audience flank the stage, effectively boxing in the characters. Observing the brutal, bittersweet reunion is The Old Man (a nicely aloof Tom Lally), a patriarch whose wanderlust infected his children. Swigging whiskey from a rocking chair slightly offstage, he interrupts the action when self-interest and shocking revelations compel him. Then there’s unsuspecting Martin (Ehren Fournier, whose wary outsider is no pushover), an ordinary guy, who gets caught up in an extraordinary situation when he arrives to pick up May for their date. But this dysfunctional drama belongs to Eddie and May, vividly and convincingly portrayed by Snook and Roos, whose passion is never strained. Eddie and May cannot articulate all their thoughts in words, but Snook and Roos - whose thousand-yard stares make obvious the electricity between them - never fail to convey what they feel. Snook is especially impressive as the agonized, volatile Eddie, who starts the play walking gingerly and concludes it staggering. Snook reveals the fear and sadness behind the tough-guy swagger. The result is a compelling, nicely ambiguous performance more unsettling than menacing, in which Snook elicits sympathy without ever fully gaining our trust. It’s a neat trick, and Snook performs it flawlessly. Ultimately, "Fool for Love’s" protagonists cannot be defined as victim or villain. Such labels don’t suffice. Instead, the passion and despair that defines their relationship defines them. It draws them together, wrenches them apart and ultimately seals their fate ensuring their love story is far from over" - Barbara Vitello, Daily Herald 08/09/07