Critics of the original productions of Fool for Love were divided from the first. Even those that praised the play, however, qualified their kudos. For example, Jack Kroll of Newsweek wrote, ' 'It's a classic rattlesnake riff by Shepard, the poet laureate of America's emotional Badlands. Fool for Love is minor Shepard, but nobody can match the sheer intensity he generates in his dramatizing of lyric obsessiveness." Frank Rich of the New York Times concurred: "Fool for Love isn't the fullest Shepard creation one ever hopes to encounter, but, at this point in this writer's prolific 20-year career, he almost demands we see his plays as a continuum: they bleed together."

ven critics who disliked Fool for Love found Shepard's production worthy of note. Robert Brustein, in the New Republic, wrote, "There is nothing very thick or complicated about either the characters or the plot, and...