The Daily Tar Heel from Chapel Hill, North Carolina • Page 7

The Daily Tar HeelFriday, December 6, 19917 f. 'Marie and Bruce' lures audience into abusive marriage relationship ByMondy Lamb Omnibus Editor reographed dance. As well as acting in the lead roles, Quails directs, and Weinstein assists. "Marie and Bruce" will he presented at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.

on Saturday and Sunday in Great Hall of the Union. he said. Much of the action takes place at an imaginary party in which Marie's thoughts serve as the conversations of the party guests. The rest of the cast Coke Whitworth, Sarah E. Ruccio, Sarabeth Fields, Duncan Boothby.Tom Quinn and Patrick Emerson all play dual roles as party guests.

Additionally, John Svara and John Bell will provide special music, and Clint Curtis will perform originally cho person who wants very much to be strong." Quails said the biggest challenge was keeping the humor in this very dark comedy. "It's a dark look at social interaction and deep personal relationships," imagination, this actually makes her experiences more real. Rather than experiencing an objective, idealized point of view, members of the audience come to know Marie's thoughts as she addresses them directly, telling them about Bruce's behavior and attempting to bring them to her way of understanding her husband. "She tries to get the audience on her side," said Anna Weinstein, who plays Marie. "At one point she says to the audience, 'He is such an asshole.

Can't you see Because the play ends right back where it began, "Marie and Bruce" leaves the audience, rather than the characters, searching for a resolution. Perhaps that is the message: As a representation of abusive relationships, the play leaves no solution for the couple because the only solution available is one that Marie, representative of most people, won't take. "A lot of time people get trapped in a relationship and say they are going to break through and leave, but they come right back," Quails said. Weinstein said, "Marie is a weak from page 1 "Marie and Bruce," a story about alt the things a woman caught in an abusive marriage wants to tell her husband, is a dark, introspective look at the cycles of an abusive relationship. "The play is striking and offensive for the purpose of making people sit up and think," said Chris Quails, who plays Bruce in the production by The Campus Theatre.

"Marie and Bruce," the second production to emerge from the recently formed group, portrays the reality of an abusive relationship as seen through a woman's imagination. It opens with a couple in bed, the sum of the reality in which Marie and Bruce live. As Marie draws the audience into her imagination, she explains her treatment at Bruce 's hands and her plans to leave him. In her imagination, she also speaks to him as she's never spoken to him before, telling him her true thoughts. In her imagination, she doesn't have to be the wife who takes abuse silently.

Although the play is set in Marie's N.C. OOK Ii.hL AaL JUL JljlJLs "ran TTU vir iL MKiMaI An ii ii ilk MM VhiuA: two days of testimony. The charges against Gardner only intensified the bitter rivalry growing between the state political parties. Republicans claim the state's current economic and social problems are the fault of the Democratic General Assembly, not two-term Gov. Jim Martin.

Democrats, though, claim state woes can be attributed to a lack of leadership from the governor's mansion. "(The 1 992 elections are) going to be long, hard and bitter," Hawke said. "They all probably will be very close and not very pretty. The gloves are already off." The major issues facing state policymakers in 1992 include the economy, education and crime prevention. But until the national recession is over, N.C.

leaders will be hard-pressed to solve these problems, Evans said. "Obviously government has to do a better job," he said. "That goes for Democrats and Republicans. There's been mismanagement all around in 1991. But when things are better on a national level they'll start to get better on the state level." Like other states.

North Carolina experienced its share of economic woes in 1 99 1 The General Assembly announced that the state would face yet another year of budget shortfalls, losing the battle between a sagging economy and rising taxpayer demand. 1 The debate about compensation for a shortfall raged through the spring and led to a series of protests by students in the UNC-sy stem about proposed school budget cuts and tuition hikes. To correct the $1.2 billion discrepancy, General Assembly members cut $330 million from N.C. public schools, community colleges and the state university system, said Democrat Henson Barnes, president pro tempore of the N.C. Senate.

The General Assembly also approved a. $657.5 million tax increase package, cut another $270 million from human resource programs and raised the state sales tax from 5 percent to 6 percent. I The state also felt the full impact of the national recession in 1 99 1 said U.S. Rep. David Price, "This recession is far deeper and far more serious than we had hoped it would be going into this year," Price said.

"Even people whose jobs aren 't in jeopardy are seeing their standard of living go down. The middle class is paying more taxes these days." But despite the continuing recession, Barnes said residents of the Tar Heel state may be in luck. In comparison with other large states, North Carolina is recovering from recent tough times. "We definitely could have gotten hit harder than we already have," Barnes said. "The good news is we're on the way up again." The General Assembly might spend much of 1 992 discussing the controversial redistricting plan compensating for the results of the 1990 census, Barnes said.

Opponents of the plan to redraw state and national congressional districts claim the plan favors Democratic candidates. "Hopefully we're going to hear a (U.S. Justice Department) decision in December," Barnes said. "If it is not approved, then we'll need to call a special session of the General Assembly. We will get it done, though.

I'm not worried." Bureaucratic inefficiency has resulted in more than just political sluggishness. In Hamlet, government inaction and lax safety inspections led to the death of 25 employees in a tragic industrial fire. Although the Sept. 3 fire at the Imperial Foods Product plant was an accident, reports revealed that many of the deaths could have been prevented. The chicken processing plant had never been inspected by state officials for safety violations in its 1 1-year existence.

Plant officials had locked several of the emergency exits, a direct violation of N.C. law. State officials have since complained of a shortage of inspectors, and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration recently took the unprecedented step of establishing a federal inspection team for North Carolina. "Realistically, this type of disaster could happen anywhere," said Bob Marks, U.S.

Department of Labor sokesman. "This country has always been concerned with the well-being of its workers, but the Hamlet fire shows that this concern may not always translate into action." Despite the magnitude of newsmaking events occurring in North Carolina in 1 991, next year may be even more remarkable. In November, voters will go to the polls to decide who will be the next president of the United States. Along with the presidential election, N.C. residents will be voting for governor and lower-level state officials and for the congressional seats currently held by Sen.

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