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Loath and Marriage
Theater review of Marie and Bruce
Marisa Tomei & Frank Whaley – Marie and Bruce (Photo: Monique Carboni)
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A wise old actor once told me the secret of a successful play is that it makes you feel something. After an hour and a half with Marie and Bruce, the only thing I felt like was getting the Hell away as quickly as possible. Actually, that’s not true. I felt that way after the first ten minutes, but stuck around anyways, trapped like the titular spouses in playwright Wallace Shawn’s alleged comedy about a marriage gone sour. I hoped that the pace would quicken, the mood would lift, or at least the audience would get a 15-minute break in the non-start action.
Alas, praying for any of the above in the New Group’s revival of this moldy ’70s chestnut is akin to believing an expired carton of milk will regain its freshness if you let it sit longer in the refrigerator. It wastes your time and stinks up the fridge.
Also wasted is the considerable talents of Marisa Tomei as Marie, and Frank Whaley as Bruce– an unemployed city couple, who despite the literary leanings implied by a bedroom lined floor to ceiling with books, prefer endearments of the four letter variety, in combinations usually reserved for those suffering from Tourette’s syndrome. At the beginning, Marie, who must have once found a redeeming quality or two in the spouse sleeping beside her, announces that she has finally decided to leave him. It’s not clear where she plans on going, and what’s so bad about him in the first place that makes her refer to him repeatedly as a piece of excrement skilled in the art of fellatio (though in much simpler language).
At first it’s kind of awkwardly funny to see an Academy Award-winning actress swearing like a 6th grader who’s just heard George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” routine for the first time. But the novelty quickly wears thinner than Charlie Sheen’s chances of returning to network television and soon you start feeling sorrier for Bruce than Marie.
Bruce in turn doesn’t seem like such a bad guy, a little uptight and unkempt maybe, but he does after all put up with Marie’s constant sarcasm and oddball behavior. She’s prone to falling asleep at parties, drinking coffee when she’s nervous and confesses to considering having intercourse with a stray dog while on an evening walk. Luckily for the pooch, he ran off before things got too weird. Unfortunately, escape is not one of the audience’s options.
Along with Marie and Bruce, we are also treated to an extended dinner party and the dubious pleasure of meeting a handful of their friends, an assortment of pompous neurotic intellectuals prone to morose, meandering monologues, made all the more maudlin with each emptied bottle of Merlot. This commentary on a certain New York social scene works well off the typewriter of Woody Allen, but sadly Wallace Shawn couldn’t carry Woody’s clarinet case, and has never heard that thing about brevity being the sole of wit.
They say no one leaves a theater humming the scenery. Not so here, Derek McLane’s inventive set design includes a rotating dinner table that allows each guest to spew his blather from center stage. Also due kudos is costumer Jeff Mahshie’s for his stitch-perfect leisure suits and flowery dresses evocative of the late ‘70s. These are impressive technical and artistic design achievements indeed, but hardly the stuff of which truly memorable nights at the theater are made of.
As for Marie and Bruce, they, much like the rest of director Scott Elliott’s forgettable production, aren’t going anywhere and worse yet it feels like forever getting there.
More ticket info here.