Marie and Bruce
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.