From the moment you arrive tonight, you've stepped into Fool for Love. The people who welcome you, the music drifting through The Palms, the passing conversations, and the moments unfolding around you are all part of the same world. Together, we're creating a place you wander into rather than one that begins when the lights go down.

To us, this play unfolds in fragments: pieces of what happened, what was imagined, and what the characters need to believe is true. It circles back on itself. It contradicts itself. It asks us to question: What's real? What's remembered? And are those things ever truly different? Is this all happening in May's mind? Is it a kind of purgatory? Is it simply another night destined to repeat itself? We don't think the play asks us to choose. Instead, it invites us to sit in the uncertainty.

That same sense of place drew us here. Sam Shepard set Fool for Love in "a low-rent motel on the edge of the Mojave," and the deeper we got into rehearsals, the more we realized the desert wasn't simply the backdrop of the play. Eddie's stories point to landmarks and roads that still exist around us. Driving to The Palms, we found ourselves passing places mentioned in the script, as though the landscape had been quietly waiting for us all along. Rather than transporting the play somewhere new, we wanted to return it to the desert that shaped it.

In our production, the motel room exists like a snapshot dropped into the middle of the desert: isolated, exposed, and strangely recognizable. Beyond it, time feels thin. People seem to arrive from somewhere just out of reach, and the past refuses to stay buried. More than anyone, May is trying to hold herself together while Eddie crashes through her life like a storm she's survived before. What is the pact between Eddie and May? Is it love? Trauma? A secret? A promise neither of them remembers making, yet neither can seem to break? The Old Man drifts between witness and ghost, father and myth, while poor Martin, like all of us, is simply trying to make sense of what he's walked into.

Visually, we found inspiration in desert ghost towns, roadside Americana, the feeling of finding yourself on the edge of town somewhere near the end of the world, the emotional logic of a country song, the sandworm sequences in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, and the feeling of Groundhog Day— if it had been directed by David Lynch.

Thank you for joining us on the loop. If you find yourself wondering whether something is part of the play, it probably is.