Smoldering 'Love' Sam Shepard style

Despite its backdrop of paved-over western mythology, Sam Shepard's

Fool for Love

is a rather intimate play for Iron Age Theatre. Though no strangers to Shepard's work - they've produced

The Tooth of Crime,

Curse of the Starving Class

, and

Simpatico

- they're far more likely to take on work about labor issues, racism, or colonialism, and sometimes all at once.

But this, a bitterly comic drama that takes place in a motel room, with a fire-breathing love affair as its engine, is awfully close up for a company that favors the wide angle. With Shepard, the devil's in the details. It's Eddie, lassoing a metal chair and yanking it back with a smirk of juvenile satisfaction, or May, allowing her weary body to yield in Eddie's arms for just one brief, indulgent second before delivering a knee to his tarnished family jewels.

Those moments - courtesy of Michelle Pauls' scrappy, dishwater-blonde May, and Adam Altman's thick-limbed, luggish Eddie - work in this production, directed by Randall Wise and John Doyle. There are more, too, offered up by other characters. Sean Close's lanky, shaggy-haired Martin, a decent fellow thrust into the middle of an indecent situation, keeps his head tucked down and tries not to meet anyone's eyes - a hound dog who wandered into a wolf's den. Dave Fiebert's weather-beaten Old Man looks like a wood carving of a western archetype - the drifter - threadbare in a rocking chair, speaking on behalf of absent fathers and the self-deluded, and chuckling and chiming in, bemused, like a spectator at a human rodeo. (But please, take him out of his character-defying Birkenstock sandals and put him into a pair of boots, or moccasins, or anything else.)

Moments, however, need to connect and build, especially when you're dealing with family secrets and heartache as raw as May's. "I get sick every time you come around, and I get sick every time you leave," she tells Eddie. "You're like a disease to me." But neither character seems to have the upper hand here. Worse, Pauls and Altman fight just fine, yet we never see the fire beneath their smoke. And without a bonfire-sized passion fueling it, what's the point of all that yearning?

This more egalitarian take on Shepard cuts some of the mileage out of Eddie and May's relationship, and I miss Eddie's coiled-up menace, the throbbing beneath May's old wounds. Still, the power of the play's language and imagery makes up for a lot of rough road, and Iron Age's team meets it at least halfway.

Presented by Iron Age Theatre at the Centre Theater, 208 DeKalb St., Norristown, through March 25. Tickets: $20. Information: 610-279-1013 or www.ironagetheatre.org

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