Marie and Bruce
Performances
Nov 22, 2013 -
Dec 14, 2013
“Darling, why is it that whenever we have a conversation you always feel sick?”
Cast & Personnel
Director
Assistant Director
Cast
- Tamarie Cooper
- Greg Dean
- Jeanne Harris
- Karina Pal Montaño-Bowers
- Charlie Scott
- Kyle Sturdivant
- Abraham Zeus Zapata
Scenic Design
Costume Design
Lighting Design
Sound Design
Prop Design
Stage Manager
Assistant Stage Manager
Booth Crew
The Play
Marie and Bruce have been married a very long time. Maybe ten years, maybe six months. Either way, a very long time.
The play begins on the morning that Marie plans to leave Bruce. They wake up. They have their coffee. We see the very different people they become when alone. They meet at a party. They go to dinner. Seemingly trivial moments in their relationship accumulate like ice on a power line.
The Catastrophic Theatre’s love of Wallace Shawn is well documented by its hit productions of Our Late Night and The Designated Mourner, each of which was declared a “can’t miss” production by major critics in Houston. Audiences returned again and again, armed with friends.
Jason Nodler, Tamarie Cooper, and Charlie Scott first collaborated on this play in 1999 with Infernal Bridegroom Productions.
In the Houston Press review of the 1999 production Lee Williams wrote:
“Infernal Bridegroom’s riotous production of his Marie and Bruce is a perfect entree into the spiny wit of Shawn’s verbal imagination… Shawn’s message is undeniably bleak, but it is also very, very funny… We talk and talk and giggle and curse, but no matter what words, what sounds we use, we can never find our way into each other’s hearts.”
In special celebration of their 20 years making theatre together, Nodler, Cooper, and Scott will reprise their roles as director and lead actors in Marie and Bruce, a devastating comedy about a terrible marriage that will probably last forever. Sounds like our kind of holiday play.
The Playwright
WALLACE SHAWN is best known for his character roles in such films as The Princess Bride, Toy Story, Young Sheldon, Clueless, Star Trek, and Annie Hall as well as his more serious turns in the films My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42th Street, but acting for him is something of a day job. His primary mode of expression is his writing and he is a writer unlike any other.
His plays include What We Did Before Our Moth Days, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, The Fever, The Designated Mourner, Evening at the Talk House, Aunt Dan and Lemon, and Marie and Bruce. He also co-wrote the screenplay for My Dinner with Andre with Andre Gregory, and he scripted and starred in Vanya on 42nd Street, a film adaptation of Anton Chekov’s play Uncle Vanya. His 2014 film A Master Builder was based on the play by Henrik Ibsen.
In the Media
DARK COMEDIES & DERANGED ELVES
November 2, 2013 |
Arts + Culture Texas
| Tarra Gaines
Photo Sets
Marie and Bruce
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Videos
"A dangerous writer...
A very rare species. He tells people things about themselves that they don’t want to know.”
— Joseph Papp on Wallace Shawn
