There’s Room for Everyone Aboard a Marital Misery Tour

“Marie and Bruce,” Wallace Shawn’s 1979 portrait of a festering marriage, is just the show to see when you’re in a really, really bad mood. Not that Mr. Shawn’s play, which has been revived in high style on Theater Row by the New Group, is likely to pull you out of that mood.

On the contrary, it encourages you to luxuriate in your most negative, misanthropic feelings. And admit it, you kind of enjoy sinking into a bubble bath of bile now and then. You know you do. And with a super cast led by Marisa Tomei and Frank Whaley, performers willing to embrace their characters’ deepest unpleasantness, Scott Elliott’s production provides one artfully mucky wallow.

It seems appropriate that a play as loveless as “Marie and Bruce,” which was first staged at the Royal Court Theater in London in 1979, shouldn’t have known much love in the three decades since its inception. Presented in New York at the Public Theater in 1980, with Louise Lasser and Bob Balaban in the title roles, it occasioned one of John Simon’s most memorably vitriolic outbursts. (He called it “the kind of play that if either our drama critics or our garbage collectors did their work properly, could not have survived one night.” Of course he also complained that Mr. Shawn, who did not appear in the play, was one of the “unsightliest actors in this city.”)

I wasn’t around for that production. Nor did I catch the 2004 film, starring Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick. (Apparently, nobody else did either.) But after seeing Mr. Elliott’s excellent 2003 revival of Mr. Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” I began to think more of and about Mr. Shawn’s corrosive, original voice and to see him as a sort of spiritual godfather to talented contemporary sourpusses of the theater like Bruce Norris (“Clybourne Park”) and Gina Gionfriddo (“Becky Shaw”).

Having been unsettled and impressed by Mr. Shawn’s “Grasses of a Thousand Colors” at the Royal Court several years ago, I was all the happier to have the chance at last to meet “Marie and Bruce” on a stage. While I won’t say it’s exactly a pleasure to make their acquaintance, I will state that they make a compelling case for Mr. Shawn as a significant and sui generis playwright, one who gives improbably elegant form to our lowest impulses.

As soon as you walk into the Acorn Theater, where “Marie and Bruce” runs through May 7, you will find the title characters fully visible on stage, in a funky bed (those sheets haven’t been changed in ages) that they have made and now must lie in. Not that Marie (Ms. Tomei) intends to stay there much longer. Stirring restlessly, chain-smoking, eyes wide open, Marie lets loose with an expletive-dense ode of hate to her husband, Bruce (Mr. Whaley), who snores by her side.

You are never quite sure how much of this diatribe is heard by Bruce (or even spoken aloud by Marie), but only a man without senses could fail to register its toxic vibes. Ms. Tomei’s Marie exists in a raw state of existential irritation, in which everything anyone does (Bruce in particular) inspires prickles of disgust. While Bruce has a placating manner, Mr. Whaley has endowed him with a defensive whine that is, well, pretty irritating.

This opening scene brings to mind a Strindberg-style exercise in marital disharmony, perfect for an acting class, perhaps, but likely to pall fast. Mr. Shawn wisely releases Marie and Bruce from their claustrophobic apartment and sends them to a party, to demonstrate that Marie’s annihilating vision can easily accommodate the wider world.

Anyone who has seen Mr. Elliott’s productions of the plays of Mike Leigh (or of “Aunt Dan and Lemon”) knows that this director loves a party, especially as a setting for bad behavior. But here he tops himself. Derek McLane’s fabulous set uses a revolving stage to turn a boozy, arty Manhattan dinner party into a carousel of narcissists on their garish hobbyhorses.

As the central part of the stage rotates, bringing different conversations into focus, the voices blend into a perfectly pitched symphony of screeching egos and obsessions that somehow never connect with one another. If you were in a charitable frame of mind, you might be impressed by these argumentative intellectuals. (Love that dopey actress from the experimental theater, played by Tina Benko.)

But if you’re seeing them as Marie does — and Ms. Tomei’s perfectly graduated expressions here make sure you do — you will feel increasingly annoyed by and isolated from them. Of course, as a theatergoer who is (I hope) not getting drunk at that moment, you can also appreciate the precision of the portraiture here (I especially enjoyed Adam Trese as the unctuous, combative host), enhanced by Jeff Mahshie’s “me generation” costumes.

The passionate fatuity of these people, and the keenly nuanced satire with which they are rendered, brings to mind parties in Woody Allen movies of the same period. (Mr. Shawn has appeared in Mr. Allen’s movies.) And it made me think anew of how much hostility lurks within Mr. Allen’s cinematic love letters to Manhattan.

Conversely, there is something like love, or at least romantic fascination, within Mr. Shawn’s blatant hostility. In separate, poetic monologues delivered by Marie and Bruce, describing what they did just before the party, the city becomes a fairy-tale forest of dark enchantment, a place of secret gardens and mysterious encounters. Every prospect pleases here (to borrow from the oft-pillaged Reginald Heber hymn); it’s only man that’s vile.

But of course for a city dweller, a landscape free of men or women is hard to come by. Besides, without other humans, a girl or a guy can feel so lonely. Though Mr. Shawn raises his title characters’ animus quotient to new extremes (and, yes, that turns out to be possible) in a postprandial cafe scene, don’t expect them to part ways just yet.

And listen for that slightest burr of tenderness in Ms. Tomei’s voice as Marie rants into the night. Cohabitation is hell, but Mr. Shawn makes the devastating, poignant point that it wouldn’t hurt nearly as much if we didn’t need and want it.

Marie and Bruce

By Wallace Shawn; directed by Scott Elliott; sets by Derek McLane; costumes by Jeff Mahshie; lighting by Jason Lyons; sound by Shane Rettig; production supervisor, Peter R. Feuchtwanger/PRF Productions; production stage manager, Valerie A. Peterson; associate artistic director, Ian Morgan; general manager, Elisabeth Bayer. Presented by the New Group, Mr. Elliott, artistic director; Oliver Dow, managing director; Geoff Rich, executive director. At the New Group@Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200; telecharge.com. Through May 7. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

WITH: Tina Benko (Janet), Russell G. Jones (Nils/Bert), Cindy Katz (Ann/ Waitress), Devin Ratray (Herb), Alok Tewari (Ralph/Ed), Marisa Tomei (Marie), Adam Trese (Frank), Frank Whaley (Bruce) and Alison Wright (Gloria).