TRENTON, Mich.–Watching Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at Open Book Theatre could be set to Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield.”

Indeed, one can imagine Ms. Benatar in her late 20s playing the part of May that in this production is played by Open Book Artistic Director Krista Schafer Ewbank. A short play of about 70 minutes, set entirely in a dingy residential motel room, the atmosphere is more like two polecats in a cage.

Eddie (Jonathan Davidson) has come back from a road trip to May, driving a horse trailer over 2,400 miles. May gives every indication that she knows perfectly well that however crappy her life is, Eddie is Mr. NotGoodForYou. Despite her announcing she has “a man” coming to see her and take her out, she punctuates her contempt for Eddie with a passionate kiss or two. They are sexually hostile and drawn toward one another; talking about their other lovers to the other as if each knows that what they have has some sort of unknown ceiling on their relationship.

Davidson is well cast as the brooding, raw, rough, controlling Eddie. Ewbank’s May is helped along by a shocking red dress cleverly chosen by the director and costume designer to show her black bra and long bare legs to great trampy effect. Ewbank doesn’t just wear the ensemble, but she works it throughout the play as her character squirms through each scene wearing some sort of scandal we learn about later. The dress is a scarlet letter that covers her whole body.

Josh Brown plays gentleman caller Martin who gets roughed up as soon as he sets foot into Shepard’s belljar of sexual destruction. Lindel Salow plays “old man” who sits to the side and talks to May and Eddie and offers commentary on each character and about himself. His actual role here is critical to the story and the inflection of the relationship between Eddie and May.

D.B. Schroeder has directed a very good production here of a story that we have no doubt could happen in any town, especially towns with shabby residential motels holding moldering family secrets–Ypsilanti, Redford, Romulus, Monroe. It’s not all that far from where any of us live.

Shepard has written a compact, taut, crackling , distilled story that is exactly as long as it need to be to make a patron say, ‘Whoah!” at the denouement.

The show plays through June 15.