One of the most striking things about Tour de Force Productions’ revival of Fool for Love is the way Eddie (Max Bernsohn) trains his eyes on May (Meghan Daaboul). Their characters may be bad news for each other, but the intensity of Eddie’s gaze leaves us with little hope that this pair will ever succeed in separating.

This is just one of the ways director Steve Koeppen’s 70-minute staging of the 1983 script by Sam Shepard feels like a go-for-broke project: No one is holding back, including Daaboul, whose performance at times feels feral as she tears into Bernsohn’s Eddie – both physically and verbally – only to scream his name the second he goes out the door.

The cast of four – which also includes David Heath as the mysterious Old Man who calmly observes May and Eddie from his rocking chair beside the bed, and Brandon B. Weaver as a protective gentleman caller – has enough fuel to light sparks on a much bigger stage, but in 21ten’s intimate black box theater, they create a roaring blaze, which makes for a thrilling 70-minute show, especially when you’re sitting just a few feet away from the flames.

In the story, the on-again, off-again lovers have caused each other no end of pain for the last 15 years. May, who ran away to the edge of the Mojave desert, where she’s now living in a cramped and crummy motel room and working as a cook, thinks she has finally escaped the clutches of their mutual obsession, but Eddie, who has tracked her down, has other ideas. He aims to bring her back to their home (the tin-can trailer she fled), and even when he’s speaking softly, saying she’ll never be rid of him, he feels like a threat – like at any moment he might pull a macho Hollywood western move and sling the slender May over his shoulder and out the door.

In an interview with ArtsWatcher Bobby Bermea, Daaboul said she’s wanted to play May ever since her freshman year in college, when a director suggested she’d be perfect for the part. No kidding. The role seems to be written for the fierce actor-turned-producer, who created Tour de Force in order to produce the kind of quality shows she wants to see and act in. So determined was she to get this play onstage, she worked on the set and costume design with Koeppen, too, and contributed to the props with Karen Root. She was also part of the set construction team and organized a benefit to help cover production costs.

On the June 6 opening night performance, Daaboul had a Band-Aid on each knee, which looked right for her scrappy character, who promises to knife Eddie someday when he’s least expecting it. On the other hand, Daaboul herself might have needed those bandages, because she throws herself into both the emotions of the play and the physicality of its fight scenes (choregraphed by David Bareford) with fear-free and awe-inspiring abandon.

Bernsohn, too, is a physical presence in Eddie’s fiery red shirt, especially when he starts practicing rope tricks and lassos May’s bedpost with a snap of his wrist. Even though we understand that all of the movement in the show was meticulously planned, it feels like it’s organically exploding from the frustrated, hurt and anguished pair themselves.

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The whole play takes place in the tiny hotel room. Despite the cramped quarters, the former lovers are always in motion, warily circling each other with the knowledge that at any moment they might strike a blow or feverishly clutch each other and kiss. As May says, ever since they met as kids, they’ve been sick with love when they’re together and sick with love when they’re apart.

Into this already combustible space, May’s burly date, Martin (Weaver), comes charging, thinking May needs his help. He’s a formidable presence. Like Eddie, you can feel him watching and listening, gauging just what the relationship between these two people who claim they’re cousins really is. From the way Eddie looks at him, though, Martin is the one who needs protecting. This thoughtful man is a kindly gentleman caller, much like Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire, another revival in which Daaboul and Bernsohn wowed audiences as ferocious verbal combatants in Imago Theatre’s production earlier this year.

While the set for Imago’s show was filled with intricate details, from dirty dishes in the sink to a bouquet of flowers on the table, Fool for Love’s efficient design, which includes a few Southwestern touches — such as a worn Native American-style blanket slung over the rocking chair and a muddy pink and turquoise comforter on the bed — serves its story well. With just a plain black frame to suggest a window, we can still feel the escalating tension as Eddie looks out onto the parking lot and sees that the woman May calls “the Countess” has followed him here.

You could dismiss both May and Eddie as simply being unhinged – and the Old Man, too, who claims he’s married to country singer Barbara Mandrell – but the production adds another layer to their characters with projections of black and white photos by Owen Carey that illustrate moments from their past that explain why they’re so toxic for each other, and also why they can’t let each other go. Sometimes the images were so fleeting, I didn’t have time to distinguish the teenage May from her mother, but it seems fitting that the family drama depicted in the photos, like memories themselves, should be a bit elusive. Perhaps the images also suggest that May’s mother was still a child herself.

The characters’ past is also alluded to in the play’s program, which includes a quote by Vienna Pharason, a therapist who wrote the book Origins of You. “What changes when you remember that every single adult was once a tiny human who grew up in a family system that was likely flawed and imperfect?” Pharason asks.

In this light, Shepard’s story of May and Eddie is deepened by our compassion.

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Fool for Love will be onstage at 21ten Theatre,  21ten SE 10^th Ave., Portland, through June 22. Find tickets and schedules here.