In the play, a woman named May occupies a stark, low-rent motel room on the edge of the Mohave desert.
She is haunted by a frenetic rodeo cowboy named Eddie, with whom she shares a mutual obsession and whom she has been trying to escape for years. He arrives there unexpectedly, desperate to drag her back with him to his farm in Wyoming. Eddie’s passion is admirable, but he takes after his father, a serial adulterer who abandoned two households.
These “fools for love” cannot get along with or without each other, yet neither can subdue their burning passion. Their relationship is mystifying and discomfiting; the atmosphere is pungent and evocative; the language is sparking with Shepard’s genius for sound and imagery.
