Heartbreak Motel: 20 Fun Facts About Sam Shepard's Fool for Love

After 30 years, Sam Shepard’s classic cowboy drama Fool for Love returns to New York. The Broadway revival, starring Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda as Eddie and May, the tortured ex-lovers reuniting in a seedy motel room, officially opens on October 8. As you might expect, there are a number of intriguing facts about a production involving a legendary playwright, talented stars and sultry behavior. Here are 20.

1. Shepard wrote Fool for Love shortly after breaking up with his wife, playwright and actress O-Lan Jones, and taking up with Jessica Lange, his co-star in the movie Frances.

2. Fool for Love, Shepard wrote in a letter to friend/collaborator Joe Chaikin is “the outcome of all this tumultuous feeling I've been going through this past year…it's a very emotional play and in some ways embarrassing for me to witness but somehow necessary at the same time."

3. Shepard wrote the part of Eddie, the rodeo stunt man, specifically for Ed Harris.

4. To prepare for his role, Harris practiced his lassoing on a steer head that he stuck in a bale of hay in the middle of his lawn,

5. By comparison, Harris’ co-star, Kathy Baker, stayed in a series of shabby motel rooms while driving to her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

6. Harris and Baker first met on the set of the 1983 film The Right Stuff. Also appearing in that movie: Sam Shepard, who received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of astronaut Chuck Yeager, and O-Lan Jones.

7. Fool for Love debuted at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, where Shepard was the playwright-in-residence, in 1983.

8. The play, directed by Shepard, made its New York debut at the Circle Repertory Theatre on May 26,1983 before transferring to the Douglas Fairbanks Theatre on November 27,1983. It ran for exactly 1,000 performances.

9. Bruce Willis was the understudy for Harris' successor, Will Patton. The future Misery star took over the lead role in May 1984.

10. In May 1997, Willis produced and starred in a revival of Fool for Love—in Hailey, Idaho, his adopted hometown.

11 Among the notable names who played Eddie and May over the nearly two-year run: Willis, Aidan Quinn, Will Patton, Ellen Barkin and Frances Fisher.

12. The play, which is to be “performed relentlessly without a break,” took its toll on the original leads. Harris got scabs on his knuckles from slamming his fists into walls; Baker suffered from exhaustion.

13. Fool for Love won five 1984 Obie Awards, including Best New American Play. The play was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist, losing to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

14. A film version of Fool for Love, directed by Robert Altman, was released in late 1985. Shepard and Kim Basinger star as Eddie and May.

15. Shepard had mixed feeling on Altman’s efforts. “On film, it comes across as kind of a quaint little Western tale of two people lost in a motel room,” he said. “In the theater it was right in front of your face, it was so intense it was kind of scary.”

16, Ed Harris was slated to direct a revival of Fool for Love for Roundabout Theatre Company in February 2005. “I actually auditioned people,” Harris told @ This Stage Magazine. “I had a really cool idea for the set but some work came up or I couldn’t find an Eddie, the character I played. I don’t remember. I was really excited about somebody I thought I had then it kind of got weird. So it just petered out.”

17. Fool for Love is performed in the West End in 2006. Juliette Lewis and Martin Henderson played May and Eddie.

18. Chris Pine and Lauren Ambrose committed to the 2014 Williamstown Theatre Festival revival of Fool for Love, but scheduling conflicts forced the stars to leave a month before the premiere. Rockwell and Arianda replace them.

19.Rockwell still found time to get into character. He attended rodeos and hung out with wranglers. He studied roping, using trashcans in Tompkins Square Park and a ladder in his apartment for practice. His dialect coach even got an Arizonan record the script.

20. Arianda is a longtime fan of the play. The Tony winner first read it around age 12. She still brought her student copy to the theater.

Fool for Love opens at the Samuel J. Friedman on October 8.