Aren't we all just a fool for love?
The Classics Theatre Project’s 2019 season will kick off with Fool For Love by Sam Shepard at Fair Park’s Margo Jones Theatre. The season will also feature plays by two other iconic American playwrights, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.
“It’s our all-American classics season,” says Gregory Patterson, The Classics founder and executive director.
Fool for Love is the third play of a quintet that includes Family Trilogy: Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West and its final installment A Lie of the Mind.
Joey Folsom, The Classics’ artistic director, considers Fool for Love to be one of Shepard’s greatest plays.
“This play is presented from both the male and female perspective and deals with many things, including toxic masculinity," he says.
“This play is presented from both the male and female perspective and deals with many things, including toxic masculinity." – Joey Folsom
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As the name suggests, it’s about love.
“I think all love, especially romantic love, is doomed to failure, doomed to end badly, until it doesn’t," Folsom says. "Every love ends — until it doesn’t.”
Fool for Love follows the story of two people, Eddie and May, going through a cycle of joy, pain, love and sorrow.
“Audiences should expect to see a lot of themselves, a reflection of their lives, because the show deals with things that are universal," Folsom says.
Folsom explains his respect for the way Shepard is willing to tell his own life story in his plays.
“Sam Shepherd is in all of them," Folsom says. "All of his work is his therapy. You have to respect someone who is so willing to put the ugliness of who is out there.”
The Classics Theatre Project launched in 2018 with a single production, so this will be its first full season. Nine Dallas artists are members of their permanent Resident Artists Company. Audiences will recognize Sasha Maya Ada from last year’s production of Enemies/People at Second Thought Theatre and Dallas Theater Center productions of A Christmas Carol.
In the final show of the season, The Crucible, Classics Theatre Project will collaborate with students from Brookhaven College.
“I’m very excited about providing a bridge for those deserving students aspiring to be professionals and professional actors from our company," Folsom says.
Fool For Love runs through March 30. Tickets are $10.
