About the Play:

Eyes for Consuela is a full-length drama by Sam Shepard, based on the unforgettable short story The Blue Bouquet by Mexican writer and Nobel Prize-winner Octavio Paz. The play tells the story of a lost soul, Henry, an American man who throws himself into the Mexican jungle chasing the shadows, ghosts, and passions of his life. Eyes for Consuela takes you on a trip from the safe world of theatrical fourth walls to the unknowable, uncontrollable spirit realm.

In Eyes for Consuela, a dishevelled man wakes from a sweat-drenching nightmare, furiously shaking his shirt and pants free of possible small jungle creatures, and hastily dresses to face the utterly dreamlike reality of remote Mexico, a torpid limbo. Henry is a lost soul from the American middle-class, middle aged and unmoored, a superfluous stranger to a wife he left hundreds of scattered miles away in snowbound Michigan, and now alone in a squalid, vine-shrouded "hotel" amid snakes, lizards and ghosts. The owner of the makeshift inn, one-eyed Viejo, warns him to stay put for his own safety, but on a brief, circular walk through the underbrush he is set upon by a peasant named Amado. The predatory figure bears a machete and a slender knife which he will use to cut the eyes from Henry's head, he tells the incredulous American, in order to present this penitent, macabre offering of "a bouquet of blue eyes" to the bewitching Consuela. The fervour of Amado's obsessed mission, his dizzying persuasiveness, and his menacing wit and insight, push Henry's sanity to its limits. In a duel of ironic pathos, humour, cruelty and metaphor, each man examines what has taken him from the woman he loves and what desperate sacrificial price might reunite him with her. At the point when the gracefully haunting Consuela appears before Henry only to dismiss his brown eyes, the sole road out of the tangled tropical forest seems indistinct but at last possible.

Eyes for Consuela premiered in 1998 at the Manhattan Theatre Club, City Center Stage II, in New York City. Its European premiere was in in 2005 at the Donmar Warehouse in London. It has also been staged in several US cities.

Cast: 1 female, 3 male

What people say:

"One leaves Eyes thinking, more than anything else, that [Sam Shepard's] plays are most beautiful when they are angry." — New York Times

"The writing has the kind of apparently effortless boldness that reminds you that you are in the presence of one of the greatest living playwrights." — New York Daily News

"…it is all about seeing and not seeing, about various forms of blindness, physical, emotional, existential. And about the sacrifices love entails. It is quirkily unpredictable and laughingly unsettling." — New York Magazine

"Shepard's writing is back at its taut best, with the play's mystery unfolding a frisson of theatrical immediacy…." — New York Post

Sam Shepard (1943-2017) was an American playwright and actor. Born in Illinois and raised in Southern California, he worked as a farmhand and musician before moving to New York to begin his career as a playwright. The celebrated author – who New York Magazine called "the greatest American playwright of his generation" – wrote more than forty plays, eleven of which have won Obie Awards. His play Buried Child won the Pulitzer for drama. Two other plays True West and Fool for Love were nominated for the Pulitzers as well, and are frequently revived. As an actor he appeared in more than thirty films, including an Oscar nominated performance for his role as test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.