Theatre in Review: Marie and Bruce (The New Group/Theatre Row) In the first few minutes of Wallace Shawn's play, Marie calls her husband, Bruce, "a damned cheap, God-damned idiot pig," a "God-damned f---ing incredible pig," and a God-damned filthy c---s---ing turd." When he asks for his typewriter, she announces that she threw it out the window. She adds that she wants out of his life at the first possible moment. Can this marriage be saved? Not bloody likely. But neither can it end, as Marie and Bruce follows its title characters across the course of a day, including stops at a cocktail party, and at a restaurant late-night drinks and coffee, the pattern never varies; she abuses him with words so toxic that they poison the very atmosphere. And Bruce deals with this treatment by not dealing with it; he takes it in, largely without comment, and, in doing so, leaves Marie with no option but to up the ante in her attacks. Five minutes into the play, it's clear that they are at a standoff. Ninety minutes later, they're in the same place. Not so much a drama as a big, gaseous burst of disgust at modern life, Marie and Bruce must have been something of a shocker in its 31-performance run at the Public Theatre in 1980. (Louise Lasser and Bob Balaban took the title roles.) But time has done nothing to make the script seem more meaningful. Listening to Marie's foul-mouthed rants quickly becomes wearying. They're not even clever rants, just a procession of obscenities put together with the kind of enthusiasm usually seen in rambunctious fourth-graders. Bruce's non-aggression plan forecloses on any possibility of drama; she spews out rage and he takes it. There is a change of location. They repeat. What's most damaging is the thinness of the characters. We never learn a thing about their work, their milieu, and, most importantly, what they ever saw in each other in the first place and what has brought them to this unpretty pass. Marie is simply a shrew and Bruce comes off as something of a simpleton. (You have to wonder what he wanted with the typewriter, anyway.) The play is an exercise in stasis, a situation shorn of any humanizing detail. As anyone who has seen Shawn's plays knows, he clearly feels that he will be sent directly to hell if he gives the audience even a moment of pleasure -- surely he is the spiritual father of Neil LaBute -- but his plays have occasionally exerted a grip; here, however, the rage expressed is too free-floating to have any impact. (By the way, one of the later scenes features a man in a restaurant discussing his bowel ailments in such appalling detail that I am forced to conclude that Shawn is also the spiritual father of Adam Rapp.) Marie and Bruce are tricky roles at best, and, under Scott Elliott's direction, Marisa Tomei attacks the former with a strange, herky-jerky delivery that is suggestive of an actress in search of a viable approach. Frank Whaley seems equally tentative in his approach to Bruce, although it's hard to see what else he could have done. In the supporting cast, the enchanting and technically gifted Tina Benko is entirely wasted. The New Group officially owes her a good role. The set designer, Derek McLane, has surrounded the action with bookshelves -- an attractive idea, even if it seemingly has little to do with the title characters. He has come up with a clever plan by which the scenes are quickly changed, however. Each new location is given a distinct feeling thanks to Jason Lyons' adept lighting. Jeff Mahshie's costumes, as befits someone who has worked in couture, easily evoke the early-'80s period without stooping to caricature. Shane Rettig's sound design is perfectly fine. In any event, it's almost impossible to imagine anyone getting caught up in the non-action of Marie and Bruce. Nobody loves an evening of invective more than I -- I'll go anywhere for a good production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -- but it has be more than the sum of its ugly words. If anything, Marie and Bruce is less. David Barbour 
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