MARIE AND BRUCE
Yet somehow Shawn manages to make these awful characters compelling. Even Lemon, for all her protofascist beliefs, wins our sympathy. Nowhere is Shawn’s gift for making unlikable characters likable more apparent than in Marie and Bruce, first produced in 1979, a year before the play version of My Dinner With Andre opened.
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In this work Shawn presents two nasty, brutish characters, Bruce and Marie, who spend the whole play showing us, and everyone else they chance to meet, just how desperately unhappy they are with each other. They’re not unlike George and Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but unlike that couple, Shawn’s Bruce and Marie have no terrible family secret to keep hidden.
So what, you may ask, makes this nasty, essentially plotless one-act so compelling? In part, I suppose, it’s just plain thrilling to see two vicious characters light into each other. But another part of the fascination has to do with this Tight and Shiny production. As Shawn himself admitted in a 1980 New York Times interview, unless the play is “acted truthfully, the whole thing will just be garbage.” Timothy Sullens’s direction of Marie and Bruce is nothing if not truthful. His work is most assured during the long, largely comic send-up of New York cocktail parties in the middle of the play, and less so in the more serious scenes at the play’s beginning (in Marie and Bruce’s apartment) and end (in a restaurant). Seeing how well Sullens brought Shawn’s party-montage to life–done, I should add, without the benefit of stage directions, for the script doesn’t have any–one wonders what comic magic Sullens might be able to conjure given a pure comedy, one that doesn’t abruptly turn vicious and nihilistic.
