I promised myself that in 2011, I would do things that scared me. I want to let people know when I’m angry. I want to be okay with being sad. I want to accept that feeling lonely is feeling human. I vowed to challenge myself more. I decided a creative challenge would be a good place to start.

So, on January 13th, at The Meta Gallery on Ossington, I’m making my stage debut in Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love.

Shepard is often called the greatest living American playwright. He’s a master of many things and everything he’s done has been a great success. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for The Buried Child. He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in The Right Stuff. Before he was 30, he’d had over 30 plays produced in New York. His plays, like him, aren’t easy to categorize. They blend images of the Old West, pop culture – rock and roll, drugs and television – scored and anchored by fractured, bizarre family units.

In art and life, Shepard is no stranger to conflict and passion. He pushed Patti Smith to start performing during their torrid affair that took place almost exclusively at the Chelsea Hotel. He was on the road with Bob Dylan. He was, in his youth, often unfaithful to his first wife, O-Lan Shepard. He ultimately left her for his partner of over thirty years, actress Jessica Lange.

Currently, two of his plays are being performed in New York, another in London, and undoubtedly, in countless smaller theaters worldwide, on stages with acting teachers watching, with nervous students stumbling through his savage work.

Shepard is famously private. The genius of work is its complex simplicity. His dialogue is straight-forward, almost beautifully plain, but he examines, without fear, the most difficult parts of being a human being. He thinks family is an animal unit. He details the brutality of being a man, and the hopelessness of being a woman. In the world’s he creates love is always dysfunctional. He recently said of love and family that, “They’re wonderful retreats from the illusion of being protected from spinning off the planet. But I don’t believe it. And I never did.”

Perhaps as a result of that belief, conflicts are almost never resolved. Characters bluster and blunder, often ending up in a no more definite place than they began. His plays end with the truth only hinted at, never definitely acknowledged. Reality is spontaneous, not coherent. Things happen, and so, things begin and then end. The illusive nature of what’s real is what makes Shepard’s work so beautiful, so difficult, and ultimately, so alive.

After reading everything I can find about him, I get two pictures of Sam Shepard. He has spent his life feeling somewhere stuck between two worlds, apparently never feeling at home or truly accepted in either.

He’s a cowboy. Or, the men in his plays are. He was raised in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, with an alcoholic and abusive father that haunts most of his work. He never felt masculine enough. But it’s his distinctly masculine, Western point of view that makes him an unlikely hero in modern art.

It seems the two parts of him will be forever be stuck, the artist and the cowboy, the intellect and the instinct, are locked in an battle that neither can ever win. It’s the duality of Sam Shepard, of  his work, and this role in Fool For Love, that makes it the most challenging creative experience of my life.

Fool for Love explores a tumultuous relationship between two characters, Eddie and May, who attract and repulse each other with equal and enormous intensity.  And who, it turns out, are half-brother and sister.

In examining this play, and in trying to become May, I’ve had to think about a lot of things, that usually, I’d rather ignore. Namely, incest, but also, larger and perhaps unanswerable questions.

Why is the most powerful love also, almost always, the most destructive? What is it about someone that gets under your skin? 

I feel the most pertinent question asked by Fool For Love, is, do we inevitably become our parents? Shepard has said of his own father, “You think about it, you talk about it, analyze it, and then all of a sudden you have become the thing that you were most vehement against. It’s very Greek. They invented this shit. Or at least gave it a name.” Are we ultimately powerless to our DNA?

This play is performed relentlessly and without a break. The characters are brittle and broken, probably never to be put together again. I’ve spent most of the past three weeks yelling my scenes at Benjamin Blais, who plays Eddie, trying to navigate my way through the muddy waters that are May. She’s angry and sad. She’s simultaneously hopeful and hopeless. I spend the play locked in the sickening push-pull of an abusive relationship and it’s uncomfortable.

What attracted me to May in the first place, is that she’s as fierce as she is helpless. In that sense, we’re probably more alike than I’d like to admit.

I am proud of myself for doing something that really does terrify me, but I’ve never been more nervous. I’m of two minds, excited to share the play with people I love, and sick about screwing everything up. Every night, I dream that I forget all my lines. I dream that I sleep through my evening performance. I dream that everything goes wrong and it’s all my fault.

Anxieties aside, I feel really lucky to be working with such talented artists. Benjamin, is fearless and unstoppable. David Christo, who plays Martin, May’s unsuspecting date, is unbelievably kind and hard working. Barry Flatman, who plays the father May and Eddie share, is one of Canada’s most prolific actors. His support is unwavering and his stories are hilarious. The man at the helm, director Steve McCarthy, is confident, challenging and fiercely intelligent.

Being the only girl amongst these passionate and powerful men has been exhilarating and, if I’m honest, difficult. Sometimes, I feel even more like May, a little lost and powerless. In the end, I really respect these men. They are beautiful artists and I feel us chipping away at something real, safe in the supportive net we’ve created.

And didn’t I promise myself that conflict was something I wanted to spend more time with?

As the rehearsal process finishes and we go up in two days, I often find myself thinking of a Shepard quote. “You’re never going to see the truth. It’s what you’re shooting for always and you always miss it. Every once in a while, you catch an edge of it. That’s what’s you hope for, I think, as an artist.”

I think in this production of Fool For Love, we are catching the edge of many truths; about love, about family, about men, about women, and ultimately, about ourselves. I hope people see themselves in these two desperate lovers. Yes, Eddie and May are in an extreme situation, but who hasn’t felt trapped in their history, in their relationships? Are we all stuck in some patterns we can’t break?

And even though I’m terrified, I’m thrilled to be apart of such a difficult, truthful and ultimately, human expression of how we’re all fools for love.

Please come see Fool For Love.

Fool for Love by Sam Shepard

Limited engagement! Only 10 performances
Preview Jan. 12th, 2011 $15
Show runs Jan. 13th – 21st at 8pm, with a 2pm matinee on Sunday the 16th.
Meta Gallery, 124 Ossington Ave.
$20