Marsian De Lellis:
Object of Her Affection

An Essay by Marissa Fenley

Marsian De Lellis’s absurdist love story, Object of Her Affection, follows Andrea, an object-sexual, through her many affairs with inanimate things—a blanket, a gun, the Berlin Wall—until her precarious attachments to unconventional objects of affection results in a deadly fall from the roof of her lover, a condemned apartment building. De Lellis’s piece, which was inspired by the documentary Strange Love: Married to the Eiffel Tower, does not lead us to understand Andrea’s object-sexuality (the sexual attraction to inanimate objects) as the source of the piece’s absurdism. Rather, De Lellis makes absurd the melodramatic love plot that continues to structure Andrea’s romantic attachments to things. De Lellis masterfully performs their one-person show with a vast array of puppets and props, manipulating a world of miniatures, spread out across several tables. They erect a scene where Andrea negotiates her romantic fantasies and desires for belonging in the world through the intimate and solitary act of playing with dolls. There is a haunting loneliness to De Lellis’s dramaturgy. As Andrea recounts her love story, De Lillis acts out a desire for reciprocity that Andrea can only find in objects. And yet, stuck in the melodramatic love plot, the objects of Andrea’s affection are determined by the genre as sources of ambivalence, disappointment, discontent and longing. 

Melodramas position love as both an inevitable source of suffering as well as the promise of its end. And like all genres, melodrama offers emotional generality—the sense that love is, ultimately, something that is felt the same way by everyone. In this way, Andrea positions object-sexuality as an orientation towards love like any other and can thus conform to the same narrative expectations. And yet, in the opening of their play, De Lellis warns us of the ultimate failure of melodrama to adequately mediate Andrea’s love story. Object of Her Affection opens on a “gruesome scene” of a woman in the “prime of her life, dying—splat—on the sidewalk.” A puppet of Andrea, sprawled on the concrete, tells us: “I’ve heard some people say that it’s better to have lost in love. But some of us are just lost… And some of us—are losers.” The dying Andrea goes on to recount her story, in her last breaths. On the one hand, she announces a structuring melodramatic conceit—that it is better to have loved and lost than to stop the whole business and have no more melodramas. However, she also warns us that sometimes such loss is not luminous—that patina of dignity that melodrama supplies to suffering—but just means you’re a loser. 

One the hand, De Lellis’s witty deflation of the melodramatic contract is wonderfully comedic. De Lellis does not miss an opportunity to make an object-related play on words—“They may have thought I was off the wall… But I was in love with one”— or sexual innuendo: “[he] pleaded with me to elevator all the way up to his top floor, just so I could go down on him.” However, the sophistication in De Lellis’s storytelling comes from their ability to highlight the absurdity of the tropes that circulate within stories of normative sexual development: Andrea has an innocent sexual awakening with her Blankey; falls for the “bad boy,” Marlin, her grandfather’s hunting rifle; develops a celebrity crush on the Berlin Wall; has a threesome with the Twin Towers; dates the emotionally unavailable Statue of Liberty; finds herself in a love triangle with the Golden Gate bridge; contracts an STD (tetanus from a rusty nail); and finally settles for Roy, a condemned apartment building. All such errant love affairs would be legitimized if they led to monogamous companionship, a nuclear family and social visibility as a “couple.” Andrea pursues each of these love plots, with the hopes of arriving at the final destination of the “couple form,” something that is ultimately unavailable to her. “But, Libby,” Andrea laments to the Statue of Liberty, “we can never really have children together. I mean sure we could adopt a highway, but youʼd never leave the island.”

As De Lellis deflates the expectations of the melodramatic plot, Andrea’s profound non-belonging seeps through. Without a proper genre, Andrea’s story lacks sufficient articulation. De Lellis ultimately does not make a sentimental plea on Andrea’s behalf to allow her to join our ranks as one of the many in the quest for love. Instead, De Lellis leaves a haunting absence where a genre should be—a “not yet” set of conditions that would have allowed Andrea access to emotional generality, participation in a collective fantasy, and a life that could have been lived amongst others (both people and things). DeLellis writes on their own relationship to the piece: 

As a queer, nonbinary person, object sexuality resonates with something deep inside that’s been festering: on the one hand sexual minorities are making strides. On the other, LGBT identity feels like it’s being gentrified in a heteronormative push towards respectability politics. Either way, I sure hope Amy’s [the subject of Strange Love] up to date on her tetanus shots.

DeLellis is unwilling to “gentrify” (or “genrify,” to coin a term) Andrea’s love story, while still giving it space of resonance within a world of recognizable tropes and figures. And in so doing, DeLellis refuses to reduce the uniqueness of Andrea’s story to a set of coherent politics. Or, in their own words: Object-sexuals “don’t so much want a place at the table as they may long for a relationship with one.” DeLellis troubles the very aspiration to “representation”—a vague evaluative category so often applied to minoritarian stories. 

As Object of Her Affection comes to a close, Andrea bleeds out onto the concrete. She asks: “Are we ever really in love? Any of us? Or is it just a made-up fairy tale in our heads that we project onto the objects of our desire?” We remember Andrea’s opening claim: Maybe there is no difference between having loved and lost and having never loved at all.