Despite finding Shepard's play to possess considerable theatre craft, Simon ultimately finds the work "ponderous, imponderable."

Originality may but need not be a virtue; remember original sin. It is time we stopped gushing about Sam Shepard's almost sinful originality (it amounts to no more than facility) and ask ourselves to what uses he puts it—in, say, Fool for Love, the current import from San Francisco's Magic Theatre, complete with his staging and cast. Since so much of Shepard's action takes place between the lines, it is good to see just what the author has in mind with his action-packed silences. And, for that matter, how he wants his often gnomic utterances to be uttered.

He makes, I regret to say, less sense of himself here than others have been known to make of him in the past, but that may be because Fool for Love is...