This week Southeast Portland’s 21Ten Theatre will be the site of two beginnings and one ending: the opening of Sam Shepard’s classic 1983 play Fool for Love on June 6, the inauguration of a new theater company, Tour de Force Productions, and the culmination of a journey that started back in the college days of Meghan Daaboul. 

For the past twenty years, Daaboul has been making theater and film in and around the Portland metro area. Most recently, she made a splash as Blanche DuBois in Imago’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire. And since her freshman year at Whitman College, where she received her B.A. with a focus on acting and directing, she’s had her eyes on Shepard’s Fool for Love character May. 

“First audition ever,” recounts Daaboul, “first audition of the season and I walked off the stage from doing the audition and the director goes, ‘Come here, for a second.’ And he says, ‘Have you ever heard of Fool for Love by Sam Shepard?’ And I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ And he goes, ‘Read it. You’d be a shoo-in for May.’”

Naturally enough, Daaboul immediately read Shepard’s dreamlike tale of love and longing and people both shaped and broken by their family history and was blown away. “The writing was so amazing,” she says today, “the plot twist that occurs was so wild, that I fell in love with it. I had already liked Sam Shepard anyway but I fell in love with this specific role and this story.”

But that was as far as it went. For the next two decades no one in town did a Fool for Love that had an opening for Daaboul to even audition. There have been two significant productions of the play in that timespan, 2009’s CoHo offering that starred Val Landrum as May and 2012’s Salt and Sage production that featured company co-founder Jenny Newbry.

In both productions, the role of May was pre-cast. It’s a part that speaks to actors much as it has spoken to Daaboul. “In the last five years,” says Daaboul, “I thought I was about to get it produced through a company and then they reneged. Finally, I said, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna do it.’”

In one way, that was just fine for Daaboul. As an artist, she demands a lot from herself and therefore, a lot from her collaborators, regardless of budget. “People were just like, ‘Oh, we’re low-budget so…’ (she gestures, dismissively). In my opinion it’s sub-par. I just got tired of working in that atmosphere. I know what it should be like. I have a high expectation of myself. I created [Tour de Force] to be a place where artists can thrive. We may not have all the pretty set pieces and whatever, but gosh, the acting is going to be amazing and solid, and the direction is going to be amazing and solid. I wanted to create a company where we maintained a level of excellence and we’re not OK with just being C-grade.” 

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Luckily, Daaboul had an ace in her pocket, the man she calls her “stage husband,” actor-director Steve Koeppen. “[Steve] and I are so like-minded in that we don’t just settle for the bare minimum,” she says. “We were working on a show where the director would say, ‘Oh, you guys are great,’ and Steve and I would be like, ‘These characters really are sort of milquetoast, and we can do so much more and we aren’t fine just with you telling us you’re great.’ So he and I went to work and really crafted, and that’s where I learned to appreciate him and where I realized we were on the same plane as far as the message and our way of being.

“He directed me in another bucket-list role, Jesse in ‘Night, Mother (at the Chehalem Cultural Center). He finds the deeper meaning in things and, you know, he’s not one of those overacting actors or directors and I’m not an overacting actor and I don’t direct that way either, so our styles of wanting to be raw and true really meshed together. I have to say, even in some of the more touted professional companies in Portland, I still end up seeing a lot of actors go up there and ‘Oh, I’m acting’ as opposed to just being. Steve and I have the same mindset on that. He’s an amazing director.”

If there was one guiding principle that this production of Fool for Love was built around, it’s the Family of Origin. “The concept of family of origin,” explains Daaboul, “is the philosophy of examining one’s self and behaviors now through the lens of what our mother and father or guardians showed us as a child.”

Daaboul’s understanding of this concept was significantly impacted by Vienna Pharaon’s book The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love. Pharaon asks, “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? Can we make space to see each other through a compassionate lens without that excusing behavior?”

It’s a question that Shepard himself might have been trying to answer as he wrote Fool for Love (and several of his other more famous plays as well). 

“For example,” says Daaboul, “Eddie leaves because that’s what he saw dad doing, right? May keeps bringing Eddie back, she cries, the way she handles men, is because she saw her mom be obsessed. I follow some psychologists on Instagram and everything now is, ‘Let’s examine what we were modeled.’ It’s not just, ‘Oh, why am I this way?’ and, ‘Yes, I have this problem.’ It’s like, OK, do you see why you’re doing this? It’s because your parents or whatever did that.’ I wanted to take it one step further.”

To go on that journey with her, Daaboul and Koeppen landed on the actor who played Stanley Kowalski to her Blanche in Streetcar, up-and-comer Max Bernsohn. “In Streetcar,” says Daaboul, “he and I just gave so much to each other on stage. It’s so easy, so refreshing to work with him because we are both of the mindset of ‘I’m just going to open up and filet myself and do with me what you will.’”

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For the key role of Martin, Koeppen turned to another familiar face, Brandon B. Weaver. “I’ve directed Brandon,” says Daaboul. “Steve’s acted with Brandon. We’re playing Martin smart. Martin’s not this bumpkin. Brandon brings this sophistication. Brandon had this innate way of being present on stage even when he wasn’t talking. Also, the juxtaposition of Max is very skinny and Brandon is a big guy.”

And then, of course, there’s the Old Man, who, in many ways, is the fulcrum of the play, the reason the narrative exists, portrayed by stage veteran David Heath, an actor of deceptively precise stagecraft. At one point during the audition process, Daaboul, Bernsohn, Weaver and Heath all were in the same room at the same time. “It was the four of us together,” says Daaboul, “and Steve was like, ‘Welp, that’s the dream team.’”

But oftentimes (not all the time, but often), “the team” was pretty much Daaboul. As happens so often in smaller to mid-sized theater, if a thing was necessary to be done, Daaboul was going to have to do it.

Luckily, she was ready: “When I was working for Circle Theatre Project, when I was at the Firehouse, or for the Gray Gables Murder Mysteries, I managed, directed and marketed. I picked the scripts, rewrote scripts, used remote controls and dimmer switches for lighting designs, stage-managed and even had to step in and run crew a few times. All those skills helped on this project. So, it wasn’t – other than the fundraising aspect – new to me.” 

Like everything else, Daaboul set her mind to raising those funds – and succeeded. She hit up friends, family, donors, businesses she had worked for, even held a benefit concert. “I said I’m going to bend over backwards to do fundraising,” says Daaboul, and now, “I’ll be able to offer them significantly more than what I had originally promised.”

It’s been a long hard road to get to May, but now Daaboul is on the cusp of achieving a dream. For that, she is grateful to the spirit of the character. “We’re playing May in such a way where we end her on a stronger note than maybe other shows have done,” Daaboul says. “Steve had this great thing where he talked about the beginning of the story is the male side of things. And then midway through it switches, and by the end, it’s May’s story.”

Perhaps more than any other art form outside of film, theater is about community: It generally takes a village. And this has been true for this production. Yet even within that irrefutable truth, it’s hard not to see this production of Fool for Love as the story of Meghan Daaboul. 

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Fool for Love

• Company: Tour de Force Productions
• Where: 21ten Theatre, 2110 S.E. 10th Ave., Portland
• When: June 6-22; preview performance June 5
• Ticket & Schedule Information: Here