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A Study on Violence, Illusion, and Love in Fool for Love

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2013, 26(1), pp.51-80
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Yu Ho-Jun 1

1평택대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Fool for Love is one of Sam Shepard’s family plays which present the issues of love and struggle between estranged lovers, Eddie and May, as well as those of American family and father/son relationship. Eddie came to May’s stark, low-rent motel room in the Mojave Desert to persuade her to go back to the countryside with him. She still loves him but also hates him because of his relationship with another woman, Countess. By the end of the theater, it is revealed that their love between May and Eddie is an incestuous relationship between half-siblings, which causes family destruction and the suicide of Eddie’s mother. Partly reflecting the writer’s autobiographic life story, he shows how love and passion comes and goes through this play. In Fool for Love, Shepard attempts to portray women characters as the independent, assuming determined and enthusiastic attitudes, different from those of his former plays. As a playwright noted for his performance-oriented plays, Shepard makes use of various kinds of violence in this play, such as physical violence, verbal violence, powerful light and sound on stage, and even fire and suicide. Violence is one of his stage strategies used not only for the communication between main characters and for the ritual ceremony, but also for the interaction between audience and the stage. In the play, there is a special presence called ‘Old Man’ who appears as the absent father not only in the stories of his offsprings but as a ghostlike character on stage as well. His double life with two women goes down from father to son, Eddie, causing his own wife’s agonizing death. Illusion itself or illusion of love which the Old Man is obsessed with, is juxtaposed with the plot of love story between his son and daughter, makes this play more successful. Implying that love can’t be lost at any price, Shepard succeeds in building a sur-realistic or psycho-realistic theater on stage, with the help of the violence and illusion in Fool for Love.

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