The Fabulous Miss Marie

Perhaps Ed Bullins’ greatest work, a high point of his “20 Century Cycle” plays about the lives of ordinary African-American people. The setting is the Wilshire section of Los Angeles in the early 1960’s. A three-day holiday party goes on at the home of Miss Marie. Her guests largely ignore the tumultuous happenings in the larger world. They are here to have a good time. Bullins’ play is a jazz composition: seemingly disjointed encounters, interrupted conversations, bawdy humor, sudden sharp violence, self-searching soliloquies and moments of intense intimacy are arranged with seeming effortlessness. The pace is swift. Bullins asks how love can be expressed in a “cemetery of human failure and class arrogance.”