MARIE AND BRUCE
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The problem with Shawn’s play is that neither Marie nor Bruce is particularly likable. Marie is a cauldron of hate boiling over. She starts off complaining that “I find my husband so goddamned irritating that I’m planning to leave him” and only lets up her abuse when she becomes sick at a party. Bruce is a much harder character to read, but his relative complexity makes him no more appealing. Sometimes he seems a classic American passive-aggressive boy-man, so helpless and utterly dependent on Marie he’ll even put up with symbolic castration. At other times Bruce seems more schmuck than schlemiel, as when he tells Marie in the most graphic terms about the incredible sex he once had with a woman sitting across the room from them.
Parallax Theater Company’s production, currently being performed at Sheffield’s School Street Cafe, could have benefited from a similar insight. Instead directors Debbie Saivetz and Victor D’Altorio have chosen to make Marie the focus of the play. This decision need not have been bad in itself (though I didn’t care for the way they staged Shawn’s marvelously parodic cocktail party as if it were dancing through Marie’s fevered brain). But that decision, coupled with D’Altorio’s and Eileen Vorbach’s intense one-note performances, has resulted in a production in which Marie and Bruce are not only unlikable but, after a few minutes, pretty annoying.
Watching Making Magic on opening night made me realize that there are far worse things than nasty little plays about nasty neurotic couples–like sleepy little plays about nice neurotic couples.
