SOURCE: ";Sam Shepard's Spectacle of Impossible Hetero-sexuality: Fool for Love,"; in Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama, edited by June Schlueter, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989, pp. 213-26.

Hart is the author of Sam Shepard's Metaphorical Stages (1987) and the editor of Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre (1988). In the following excerpt she criticizes Shepard's portrayal of May, the female lead in Fool for Love, noting May's subservience to the male protagonist Eddie. Hart also finds that Shepard upholds the authority of the patriarchal father in the play and that Fool for Love turns more on the relationship between a father and son than between a man and a woman.

Fool for Love was the first of Shepard's plays that addressed the question of heterosexual ";love"; as a central theme. In 1981, Marranca pointed out that Shepard seemed to have no interest in relationships between men and women...