Marie and Bruce

Publication

In Four Plays; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. ISBN 0374525358

New York: Grove Press, 1987. Reissued 1988. Introduction by John Kennedy Toole. ISBN 0802130186

New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1987. [Acting edition.] ISBN 0822207346

Production

First produced in 1979 by The Royal Court Theatre, London; directed by Les Waters.

Marie: Stephanie Fayerman

Bruce: Philip Donaghy

Also with Robert Hamilton, Annie Hayes, Paul Jesson, Paul Kember, Robin Pappas.

First U.S. production in 1980, The New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater; directed by Wilford Leach.

Marie: Louise Lasser

Bruce: Bob Balaban

Also with Tom Costello, Griffin Dunne, John Ferraro, Sakina Jaffrey, Parker McCormick, Frank Modell, Angela Pietropinto.

Last Planet Theatre, Berkeley, California, 1999; directed by John Wilkins. Review

Film version produced by Holedigger Films, 2004; directed by Tom Cairns. Production information (IMDb). Reviews have been, not surprisingly, mixed: Geoffrey Gilmore (review no longer online) liked it, while Hollywood Reporter praised the filmmaking but was baffled by the play, and the less-than-a-sentence summaries in Sundance Festival coverage called it "unlikable" and "almost uncomfortable" (almost?).

Marie: Julianne Moore

Bruce: Matthew Broderick

Also with David Aaron Baker, Bob Balaban, Steve Burns, Griffin Dunne, Tom Riis Farrell, Campbell Scott, David Wiater.

God—darling—you don't think you might be mentally ill now, do you? I mean, darling, you don't think you might be crazy, do you? I mean, do you think you might actually be crazy now? God, darling, I really hope not—

Marie and Bruce (1978) by Wallace Shawn

A dream-like day in the intolerable life of a married couple. At first, things seem simple: Marie hates Bruce, and Bruce barely notices. But as they go through the motions of polite interaction with increasingly insane acquaintances, they both reveal their helpless need and disgust for each other and for life, alternating between wild flights of verbal abuse and erotic reverie. At the end of the day, we seem to be back where we started.

Notes

Marie and Bruce was slightly more traditional in form and certainly no more outrageous in content than some of Shawn's previous work, but it was the first time one of his assaults on middle-class sanity had attracted much attention—partly due to the casting of Louise Lasser, who had just left the TV show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and a bitter divorce with Woody Allen. Many were impressed by the play's emotional force and its raw but playful language, but critic John Simon was not among them: "Written (if that is the word for it) by Wallace Shawn, one of the worst and unsightliest actors in this city, Marie and Bruce is the kind of play that, if either our drama critics or our garbage collectors did their work properly, could not have survived one night at the Public Theatre." (Shewey)

Whatever kind of play it is, it was the culmination of Shawn's experiments with portraying hellish internal conflicts and middle-class social rituals through an Absurdist filter. Marie and Bruce are hardly realistic characters, but there are recognizable people and interactions somewhere behind the outlandish, scabrous verbiage; it's not hard to imagine that we're watching a quiet, genteel play about repressed unhappiness, but involuntarily reading the minds of the characters and hearing their worst fears and most unacceptable impulses dubbed over the dialogue. Allen, in the subtitled "what they say/what they think" scene in Annie Hall (1977), treated the same idea as a gentle neurotic joke—but for Shawn, there's not much of a line between neurosis and psychosis, and all we can hear is the uncensored, irrational inner voice.

Despite the flashes of humor, it's a pretty hopeless picture, and Andre Gregory seems to be criticizing this sort of thing in My Dinner with Andre when he talks about "[T]hese plays in which you show that people are totally isolated now ... and their lives are obsessive and driven and desperate .... the picture of the world that you're showing [the audience] in a play like that is exactly the picture of the world that they already have. .... And so the experience has helped to deaden them." In the same year that he wrote Marie and Bruce, Shawn began meeting with Gregory—whose fear of "deadening" the audience had led him to abandon theater almost completely—to discuss this and other dilemmas, a process that would later become their famous dinner.