Fool for Lovewas the last play Shepard wrote for the Magic Theatre. Their long-standing and highly productive association ended shortly afterward, with Shepard moving away from the San Francisco area and eventually setting up home with Jessica Lange on a ranch near Scottsville, Virginia (where they stayed until a further move in 1995, this time to Lange's home state of Minnesota). All of this was a natural process of moving on, but it had marked effects on his writing output, which slowed dramatically from the mid-'80s. The day-to-day demands of running the ranch, and of bringing up a family with Lange, have meant that Shepard has inevitably had less time to devote to his writing. Perhaps more important still, the fact that he is no longer affiliated to a specific theatre has meant less immediate motivation to write, since the effort required in mounting new work has become far greater. The three new stage plays that Shepard has written since he left the Magic – A Lie of the Mind (1985), States of Shock (1991), and Simpatico (1994) – have all premiered in New York, but not without difficulty. Simpatico, for example, eventually appeared at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre after it proved impossible to find commercial backers to mount the play either on or off Broadway. Financial difficulties have been even more pronounced with Shepard's attempts to move into the expensive craft of filmmaking.