Post by mallardo on Oct 29, 2016 16:51:32 GMT
A bit of a Sam Shepard revival on at the moment with Buried Child (with Ed Harris) coming soon to the Trafalgar Studios and this production at Found 111 on Charing Cross Road. There hasn't been much (or any) buzz about this and I don't know why. With Lydia Wilson in the cast I'd have thought people would be clamouring to see it - but perhaps not everyone is as smitten with Ms Wilson as I am.
She does not disappoint. As May, one half of the team of star-crossed "fools", with her bleached blonde hair and thick makeup and tight red dress, she is sexy as hell and as remote from her recent sojourn as Kate Middleton as it is possible to be. May's problem in the play is Eddie who has tracked her down (yet again) to a seedy motel in the Mojave Desert where she has been trying to lose him from her life. Or has she? Eddie has a different story. And so does the Old Man who is a kind of spirit presence who hangs around commenting and intervening and who may be the father of them both. Or not.
This is one of Shepard's most overtly mythic plays. Eddie is the archetypal cowboy, the wanderer who loves and leaves, as if he can't help himself, as if he's fulfilling the terms of some contract he's made with life. There's no question of his love for May - or hers for him - but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Eddie is played by Adam Rothenberg, an American actor I didn't know, but he is authenticity incarnate. He couldn't be truer to the character if he was Sam Shepard himself (who played the part in the movie version).
Wilson doesn't have that level of truth at the beginning but she comes into it. She has a long speech late in the play that finds her fully invested in the epic despair of this woman, this plaything of fate. Joe McGann is wonderful as the Old Man, just right, and Luke Neal does well with the role of May's "date", Martin, more of a plot device than a character.
It's high intensity stuff, an overflow of raw emotion squeezed tightly into 70 minutes, no interval. And of course in this venue we are all up close and personal. According to the programme, this is the last production there. Found 111 is searching for a new home. They're going out with a bang!
