Review: In ‘Marie and Bruce,’ It Takes Two to Do This Nihilistic Tango

NEW YORK — Wallace Shawn’s 1979 play of marital discordance begins with a woman telling her sleeping husband that she’s planning to leave him. In most stories, this would mark the end of the relationship. But “Marie and Bruce,” which is being revived at Brooklyn’s Jack, is considerably more perverse than most stories.

After her announcement, Marie (Theda Hammel) hurls a logorrheic rush of profane insults at Bruce (Gordon Landenberger) — “sickening turd” and “goddamned filthy son of a bitch” are among the few printable ones. She continues after he wakes up and amiably offers to make them breakfast. He is either so used to this treatment that he can tune it out, or this is Shawn’s way of showing how little men pay attention to what women say. That Hammel is transgender adds another layer to the setup; she said in an interview that she had long wanted to play Marie.

But there is something else going on in this scene, brought out by Hammel under Knud Adams’ direction: It’s that Marie appears to get a thrill out of her anger, that it is a kind of self-conscious diva performance.

Marie wants attention, and even begins the show by playing the piano louder and louder, until Bruce wakes. (Hammel did the sound design and wrote the original music.) At times, she breaks into hungry grins, as if excited by her own rage; the highly performative display of loathing creates a weird frisson of erotic challenge. The leads’ acting is not traditionally polished, but the scene has a punk energy — Adams has demonstrated his touch with off-kilter comedy in such plays as “Tin Cat Shoes” and “The Workshop.”

Then the tone abruptly changes: Marie starts calling Bruce “sweetheart,” and agrees to meet him later at a party. Why the apparent change of heart? Hard to tell. But then Shawn does not necessarily care for psychological logic, or logic of any kind, as indicated by what happens to Marie on her way to the shindig: She encounters a little dog, then enters a mysterious, otherworldly garden and temporarily falls asleep — echoes of Dorothy ending up in a poppy field in “The Wizard of Oz.”

At the party, alcohol makes Bruce drop his debonair mask; he tells Marie that they don’t have enough sex (his actual words are rather more florid) and recounts in graphic detail a pleasurable encounter with another woman. Landenberger, who doubles as set designer, deftly suggests the resentment boiling under a man’s meek exterior.

Shawn also satirizes the chatter common to a certain intellectual-liberal milieu as we hear snippets from cocktail conversations. The other guests are played by a quintet of alt-comedians, including Peter Mills Weiss and Lorelei Ramirez, but oddly their exchanges have little zip and are flatly staged. (In Scott Elliott’s 2011 revival with the New Group, the party scene was a virtuosic tour de force.)

The play’s unsettling mix of hyperrealism and surrealism continues at the restaurant where Marie and Bruce have dinner, and Marie’s anger flares up again — it is hard to underestimate the verbal assaults Shawn unleashes in this show, though their cartoonish violence and sheer repetitiveness can also be tiresome.

By the time the pair make it home, they look ready to repeat their nihilistic tango the next day. This may be one of the most depressing visions of coupledom ever put to stage.

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‘Marie and Bruce’

Through July 28 at Jack, Brooklyn; jackny.org.

Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.