Fool for Love Analysis

The entire play takes place within May's motel room, which (as you might have gathered from the descriptor "low-rent") is not the snazziest of establishments. According to the stage directions that...

You can't really talk about a narrator per se with dramas, since the characters do all of their own talking—there's no outside narrator shaping what's going on. That said, factors such as the pla...

Well, it's a dramatic one-act play, so "drama" is kind of a no brainer, right? However, Fool for Love is definitely also a tragedy—come on, it's using the same playbook as Oedipus Rex, which is o...

It's sad times in this rundown motel room—that's clear from the get-go. As we've already said elsewhere, the play is a tragedy, and our characters are pretty sad individuals. Sure, lots of people...

Well, let's put it this way: These characters aren't going to be hosting Masterpiece Theater any time soon. This is not a stuffy or prim crowd, and it shows in the dialogue. There are lots of examp...

The title is so great, because it really makes it sound like you're going to get some lighthearted fluffy romantic comedy… and instead you get two half siblings wrapped up in a nasty codependent...

So what's up with the epigraph? Well, we're not really sure, but if we had to guess (and that's what we're here for), we'd say that Shepard's playing with us a little bit with this epigraph. The qu...

The Old Man gets the last word in the play. Now that Eddie and May have scurried off, he's free to just keep living in his own little imaginary world where he's married to Barbara Mandrell. Self-de...

Fool for Love flies right by—it's a short read, and the prose is very readable. The themes and characters are hard enough to sift through, so we guess Shepard gave us a little break by making the...

Lovers' QuarrelA man named Eddie has shown up at a motel room belonging to a woman named May, and May just doesn't seem to know how she feels about it. On the one hand, she apparently hates him. O...

Eddie has come to see May after a long absence. He seems to want her back in a lovey dovey kind of way, but apparently she's a thousand times bitten and now (finally) shy—she doesn't trust him...

We meet Eddie and May, two former lovers. Eddie has come to visit May in her motel room; it seems that they had been living together before, and May had peaced out when Eddie went on a long trip w...

Fool for Love can be thought of as at least semi-biographical, since Shepard's "family trilogy" was partially inspired by his own family drama. Oh, and he was having love problems around the time h...

In terms of what those in the biz call "sexual situations," the steaminess factor is pretty low; there's mostly just some kissing and some googly eyes between Eddie and May. Those sexual sitches be...

Haggard, Merle (stage directions)Mandrell, Barbara (120; 587)The Marlboro Man (69)Tracy, Spencer (509)