San Jose Stage Company Continues Season 35 with FOOL FOR LOVE

San Jose Stage Company continues their Season 35 honoring an American Theatre icon who shaped the very core of their organization with their presentation of Sam Shepard's Fool for Love. This cowboy romance dissects the poignant causes and effects of love lost through the retrospective eyes of two past lovers.

FATEFUL ROMANCE BATTLING PERCEPTION AND REALITY

This quintessential Shepard work examines, with searing truth and dark humor, the impactful causes and effects of love lost through the retrospective eyes of two past lovers. Eddie finds May holed up in a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert and threatens to drag her back into the life from which she had fled. Forced to unpack the deep secrets and dark desires of their tangled relationship, passionately tearing each other apart. Reality and dream; truth and lies; past and present mingle in an explosive love story.

Sam Shepard transformed the landscape of American Theatre, his passing in July of this year left a hole in the theatre community yet his words and impact live on through his masterful works. As Clinton Stark wrote of San Jose Stage Artistic Director Randall King: "You get the feeling there's kinship here between Shepard and King." The Stage is pleased to add Fool for Love to their lexicon of produced Shepard works, including; Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1987), True West (1988 & 2006), Curse of the Starving Class (1993), & Buried Child (2012).

About the Playwright

Sam Shepard, was an American playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director whose body of work spanned half a century. Described by New York Magazine as "the greatest American playwright of his generation." He wrote 44 plays, winning 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most given to any writer or director. Shepard received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009.

Shepard's plays are chiefly known for their bleak, poetic, often surrealist elements, dark humor, and rootless characters living on the outskirts of American society. His style evolved over the years, from the absurdism of his early Off-Off-Broadway work to the realism of Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class (both 1978).

Penning his first play in 1964 in unprecedented fashion his next three works Chicago, Icarus's Mother and Red Cross, all written in 1965, would earn him his first three Obie Awards. In 1975, Shepard was named playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre, where he created many of his notable works, including his Family Trilogy. One of the plays in the trilogy, Buried Child, won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize, and was nominated for five Tony Awards. This also marked a major turning point in his career, heralding some of his best-known work, including True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind.

As an actor he had a nearly 40 year career portraying over 70 roles in TV & Film. His first high-profile role came as the lead in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven in 1978. Other notable films include: Frances (1982) where he began his 30 year romance with Jessica Lange, The Right Stuff (1983) earning him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor nomination for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager, Steel Magnolias (1989), The Pelican Brief (1993), Black Hawk Down (2001), The Notebook (2004), Safe House (2011) and Mud (2013). In 2015 he joined the Netflix original series Bloodline, co-starring Sissy Spacek.

In July of 2017 he died in his home in Kentucky due to complications of Lou Gehrig's disease at the age of 73.

About the Director

Kenneth Kellher serves as Resident Director at San Jose Stage Company, where he has directed over twenty shows, including multiple Shepard works; True West, Buried Child, & Curse of the Starving Class. Among his other notable productions for The Stage are the award-winning production of Death of a Salesman (Standout Classical Production by Silicon Valley Theatre Awards, Best Production of 2015 by San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle), The Threepenny Opera (Theatre Bay Area Outstanding Production of a Musical and Outstanding Direction of a Musical), the World Premiere of Jane Austen's Persuasion, and Red, to name a few. He served as Resident Director of The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, and was Artistic Director of Pacific Repertory Theatre. He has directed for San Jose Repertory Theatre, TheatreWorks, California Shakespeare Theater and numerous other theatres.

For tickets ($30-$65) or more information, the public may contact San Jose Stage Company box office at 408-283-7142, or www.thestage.org.

Photo credit: Dave Lepori

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