New FOOLS meet old FOOLS.

FOOL FOR LOVE cast at Riverside Theatre in Iowa City 1997, left to right: Christie Katol (MAY), Levy Lee Simon (EDDIE), Jeffrey James Ircink (MARTIN), Luis Sierra (THE OLD MAN).

FOOL FOR LOVE cast at The Alchemist Theatre in Bayview (Milwaukee) 2011, left to right: Bethany Ligocki Peters (MAY), Alex Grindeland (EDDIE), Derek Burton Morris (EDDIE), Jeffrey James Ircink (THE OLD MAN).

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Revisiting "Fool For Love" at The Alchemist Theater, June 3-18.

That's me (above, left) as MARTIN in Riverside Theater's production of "Fool For Love" , April 1997. I haven't acted in a fully-staged theatrical production since 2004. It's about time. Fourteen years later, I'll be making my Milwaukee stage debut as THE OLD MAN (haha...amusing) in The Alchemist Theatre's production of Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love", June 3-18. The playwright, on turning into his father:

'You think about it, you talk about it, analyse it, and then all of a sudden you have become the thing that you were most vehement against. It's very Greek. They invented this shit. Or at least gave it a name.'

One of a number of actor/playwright Sam Shepard's tour-de-force plays on how fucked up life can be, "Fool for Love" was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won an Obie for Best Play. His other plays include: "True West", "Buried Child" (nominated for a Tony, 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), "A Lie of the Mind" (Drama Desk award), "Curse of the Starving Glass" and "The Tooth of Crime". Here's the New York Times review for "Fool for Love" from 1983.

What Sam Shepard specializes in is the ill-made play. He's a genius at it, an originator whose creative impulse owes more to the fractures of life than to the strictures of drama. Often critically dismissed because he doesn't write by the rules: long considered willful, intractable, amok - for all that, the truth is that Sam Shepard is the single most important American playwright since Eugene O'Neill. - Boston Globe, December 15, 1985

The Alchemist Theatre & Bayview Lounge is located in the heart of Bayview (suburb immediately south of Milwaukee). It was voted #1 theater venue in 2010 by WISN-TV, runner-up in the Shepherd Express' Best of Milwaukee/2009, and co-owner Aaron Kopec was voted by the Shepherd Express as Entrepreneur of the Year in 2008 and runner-up in 2009.

Get your tickets here (and for more info on the the production). Get'em now. Click "TICKETS" on the left panel. Otherwise I will hunt you down. Oh -I have the least amount of dialogue in the play AND I never leave the stage. I sit in a rocker observing the action (I speak softly and infrequently and carry a carry a glass of bourbon). Alex Grindeland - Eddie, Bethany Peters - May, Derek Burton Morris - Martin.

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Sam Shepard's latest. And a "Fool for Love".

I was reading a review in the local paper of Shepard's latest book and I was immediately whisked back to the 1997 "Fool for Love" production I was in at the Riverside Theatre in Iowa City (regional theater). It was my first "comedic" turn...which is pretty interesting as the play is far from a being a comedy.

Left to right: Christi Kathol, me and Levy Lee Simon. I remember telling Lee during one particular moment in rehearsals to throw me up against the wall a little harder (I'm not a Method actor per se). He did. This play is intense in its words. Once the actors make the words come to life on stage, it's a powder keg. And Lee's bigger than I. One of my favorite theater experiences.

Read the New York Times review of Shepard's book.

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