WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell must have gotten to know each other real well, real fast this summer. If their impossible mission was to achieve an instant, unfathomable intimacy, that assignment has been more than fulfilled in Daniel Aukin's knockout production of Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love," which runs through Saturday at the Williamstown Theater Festival here.
Playing a man and a woman who spend their lives running away from, and straight toward, each other in this 75-minute, 31-year-old drama, Mr. Rockwell and Ms. Arianda project a mutual understanding that stings like a cut that won't scab. Such dangerous awareness is found only among members of the same mortal family or longtime lovers. Imagine what it means if, like May and Eddie in "Fool," you happen to be both.
Ms. Arianda and Mr. Rockwell were cast in their roles barely a month ago, after the show's original stars, Lauren Ambrose and Chris Pine, dropped out. Sometimes urgency is the soul of theater, and perhaps limited rehearsal time worked to the advantage of a play that is, as the script dictates, to be "performed relentlessly without a break."
Yet in portraying endless desperation, Mr. Aukin's revival never feels rushed or frantic. His version has the full quota of bruising physical contact that's expected of "Fool for Love." But it's the tightly stretched silences that get to you, with their suggestion that what's occurring here has always been happening and will never cease.
The depth charges within the quiet link this work to the fatalism of ancient tragedy. Mr. Shepard's late-20th-century portrait of what contemporary jargon would call a codependent couple starts to resonate as a ballad of ageless archetypes. Like Yael Farber's current revival of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," at the Old Vic in London, this production made me feel the full primal force of a piece I had wrongly concluded was tuckered out.
The supercharged 1983 New York production of "Fool," which originated at the Magic Theater in San Francisco and starred Ed Harris and Kathy Baker, still vibrates in my memory. But subsequent interpretations, including Robert Altman's 1985 film and a 2006 London revival starring Juliette Lewis, le ft me slightly embarrassed about my earlier infatuation.
Perhaps, I thought, "Fool" no longer spoke to me as it did when I was in my 20s and still agreed with Mr. Shepard's contention, expressed in an interview around that time, that love is "terrible and impossible." And what a relief to be long past that.
But Mr. Aukin's production had me believing again that love is a horror that shouldn't be wished on anyone. From the moment a gut-wrenching mechanical hum signals the start of the show, this "Fool" never lets up in its stealth attack on the nervous system. And every line of dialogue registers as a cri de coeur, even when spoken in casual asides.
Nothing new has been interpolated. Much of the stage business here has precedent, including the startling amplification of the slamming of doors, an activity with which "Fool" is filled. But these devices won't resonate unless you feel you're experiencing them through the raw senses of Eddie and May. Ms. Arianda and Mr. Rockwell guarantee you do.
The couple's universality is established when we first see them. Their faces are hidden — hers by a curtain of hair, his by a cowboy hat, this being a Sam Shepard play. They're in one of those motel rooms that time forgot (Dane Laffrey did the set), on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Though they have just reunited after a long separation, their postures suggest postcoital sadness, and anger at the prospect of having sex and getting sad all over again.
They talk — in threats and recriminations and supplication — and neck, and throw each other against the walls, and fall on the floor and the bed. Whether quarreling about Eddie's alleged affair with a rich woman called the Countess or retelling stories of their youth, they exude a n energy that both feeds and devours them. She demands that he leave (it's her room) and begs him to stay. And then the Old Man starts to speak.
Played by Gordon Joseph Weiss, who shrewdly banks his fires until a climactic blaze at the end, the Old Man isn't really there, except that he's always there. He is (probably, maybe) the father of both Eddie and May, who have different mothers. He's Dad the destroyer, who mapped out the steps for the apache dance that defines his children's lives.
The battle being waged isn't just between Eddie and May, but between them and their father's ghost. In exquisitely bleak monologues of reminiscence, they twist memory into weapons of war, while a poor sod named Martin (Christopher Abbott, pe rfect in his incomprehension), May's date tonight, listens dazedly. As in Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," love that hates loves an audience; it turns adversaries into allies.
Every technical aspect, especially Justin Townsend's lighting and Ryan Rumery's sound, underscores a paradoxical sense of a fatal connectedness and isolation. And Mr. Rockwell and Ms. Arianda exist in an electric here-and-now that also feels like the forever of an unending fugue.
Ever since she dazzled New York with her breakout performance as a gamut-running actress in David Ives's "Venus in Fur" a few years ago, Ms. Arianda has been seeking a part that would similarly tap her emotional expansiveness. She's found it in May, again combining a specific, idiosyncratic presence with the aura of the enigmatic Everywoman.
Similarly, Mr. Rockwell, an offbeat leading man in movies like "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," slides seamlessly into the role of a Marlboro Man manqué. It's a self-defining adolescent myth that he's both trapped in and half-realizes is bogus. In Mr. Shepard's world, people never really know themselves, much less anybody else.
But they know enough to be awfully good at twisting knives in the ones they love, an activity that affords endless repetition and always hurts as if it were the first time. When Eddie and May slam doors on each other, it's never a definitive goodbye. It's just the curtain raiser for the next act in hell.
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