Editor's Note

By Jim O’Quinn

Somewhere in distribution limbo there sits an unreleased film version of Wallace Shawn’s unsettling, scaldingly funny 29-year-old play Marie and Bruce. Shawn’s profanely unhappy married couple is played in the movie by Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick, taking on the roles indelibly portrayed in the play’s 1980 U.S. debut by a savagely deadpan Louise Lasser, fresh from her stint in the title role of television’s groundbreaking nighttime soap Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (and the rigors of a bitter divorce from Woody Allen), and, in a touchingly complex incarnation of the vulnerable nerd character he has often been called upon to play in the years since, Bob Balaban.

For me, that production at New York City’s Public Theater was not only outrageously entertaining but mind-altering, and Wally Shawn gained a permanent convert. But not everyone responded that way—and some of those others were critics. In what has to be one of the most tasteless sentences of his apparently endless career, John Simon had this to say: “Written (if that is the word for it) by Wallace Shawn, one of the worst and unsightliest actors in this city, Marie and Bruce is the kind of play that, if either our drama critics or our garbage collectors did their work properly, could not have survived one night at the Public Theater.” Simon’s boorishness is insight-free, certainly, but it demonstrates what a tough row Shawn has had to hoe as a playwright confronted by virulent and aggressive critical disapprobation.

To this day, in my mind Lasser and Balaban are Marie and Bruce—but that doesn’t mean I’m not dying to see the movie, and it doesn’t mean I’m any less puzzled about why Marie and Bruce—which was championed by many critics as vigorously as it was deplored by Simon—has been so infrequently produced in American theatres over the past decades. Maybe Don Shewey, in his perceptive essay/interview “The Playwright Nobody (and Everybody) Knows,” is right: Shawn’s plays are “well, rather scary for theatres to undertake,” he posits, and they can leave audiences feeling “baffled, uneasy, even enraged.” Shawn himself acknowledges as much in his disarmingly candid essay “Writing about Sex” in this issue. And his conversation with Shewey goes on to explore why, despite all the critical fuss on the one hand and his alternative celebrity-actor identity on the other, Shawn remains (as our headline would have it) the playwright both nobody and everybody knows.

The subject of our cover feature, Bonnie Monte, might well have similar sentiments about her standing as a director. As she explains to interviewer Charles Ney in “The Monte Spin,” she has spent the past 18 years steering, refining and expanding the work of the venerable Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey—and in the course of those seasons has directed more than 40 productions, about half of them Shakespeare. But focus has its drawbacks: Unless you’re one of the 100,000-plus patrons who visit STNJ annually, it’s not likely you’re in the know about this passionate and articulate artist’s directorial style or her characteristic approach to the classics. We hope to correct that deficiency with a generous helping of Monte’s ideas and enthusiasms—bolstered by images of STNJ’s sterling production values, including a ravishing set designed by Marion Williams for Monte’s 2006 Cherry Orchard, gracing this month’s cover.