"There's not a movie in this town that can match the story I'm going to tell," Eddie tells the hapless Martin, a local yokel who turns up to take May to the picture show, only to find a ritual drama in progress as the sparking, sparring long-time lovers look to light and quench each other's fire. Martin doesn't know what to make of it, but he's a receptive sounding board — and a lot less hostile than Eddie's unseen paramour, whose role consists of peeling into the hotel parking lot and spraying bullets. Even the Old Man gets into the act, recalling his peripatetic two-timing as "the same love, just split in half, that's all." Duality crops up often in Shepard, from True West to A Lie of the Mind, both better plays than this one. But Fool for Love has a bouncing-off-the-cardboard-walls energy that's hard to resist. And in the tiny New Rep black box, a feisty Stacy Fischer and high-pitched, hurtling Timothy John Smith, both mixing savagery with seduction, put it across like a two-pack of Red Bull.
The heroine of Theresa Rebeck's Bad Dates (at Merrimack Repertory Theatre through April 12) owns 600 pairs of shoes. And having first been worn by the irresistible Julie White, for whom the 2003 one-woman comedy was written, these are hard shoes to fill. Enter Elizabeth Aspenlieder, the appealing actress who plays Texas refugee, single mom, and Manhattan restaurant manager Haley, chatting us up as she prepares for and recovers from the dangerous liaisons of the title, in the lively Shakespeare & Company production that has transferred to MRT.
The artfully constructed if schmoozy Bad Dates never establishes why we're in Haley's awfully-ample-for-a-New-York-apartment bedroom watching her mix and match outfits and fling shoes. But it does shape its series of girl talks into a show that encompasses not just likable-female empowerment and re-entering the dating game but also Zen Buddhism and blowing the whistle on the Romanian mob.
The key to the show, however, is the insecure yet cocky character of Haley, veteran of a failed Lone Star State marriage, mother of a 13-year-old co-fashionista, and self-proclaimed "restaurant idiot savant" who has advanced from waitressing to running the popular if dubiously connected bistro where she works. Haley loves her kid and her job with the same gusto she brings to her footwear and will do just about anything to protect them — the kid and the job, not the shoes, which, being a veritable army with heels like bayonets, can probably protect themselves.
Calling to her off-stage daughter, who's entertaining a guest we've come to know as "The Bug Guy," Haley suggests that the teen make coffee. "And don't put those extra scoops in, that's just for me. Other people don't drink it that way," she cautions. This might have been the key that unlocked the character for Aspenlieder, a physically adroit comedian who, with her bushy blond bangs and ingenuous manner, hovers between glamour and girl-next-door. In constant motion, the expressive performer talks as much with her body as she does with her mouth. And she contributes as much to the conversation as Rebeck does. It's not a conversation about rocket science, but you could do worse than to let Haley's romantic and other, more sinister, intrigues bend your ear.
