About the Play:

Eyes for Consuela is a full-length drama by Sam Shepard, inspired by the unforgettable short story The Blue Bouquet by Mexican writer and Nobel Prize-winner Octavio Paz. This four-person drama tells the story of Henry, an American in the midst of a failed marriage who has fled to Mexico. A late night walk under the stars leads him to Amado, a knife-toting desperado with a terrifying obsession. During the holdup, the two exchange stories of love, loss, and life events that make the two see eye to eye.

Eyes for Consuela depicts the mid-life crisis of Henry, an average sort of American who has fled a failed marriage and his possession-filled but otherwise empty Midwestern life, and seeks refuge and solace in a rundown hotel in the steamy jungles of Mexico. Ignoring warnings, he goes for a solitary walk one dark night and is set upon by a knife-wielding and seemingly crazed bandit named Amado. But the man isn't interested in the American's money; he wants to cut Henry's blue eyes from his head. According to Amado, "a bouquet of blue eyes" is the only thing that will make his dead girlfriend Consuela smile. Henry insists his eyes are brown. 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 separates 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 follows two men from different worlds who find a common ground.

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.