Mixing It Up With the Geniuses : Steve Martin’s Ideas at Play in ‘Picasso’

In “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” which opened Saturday night at the Westwood Playhouse, Steve Martin approaches playwriting with the energy and the reinless irony--perhaps the first purely exhilarating irony ever concocted--that he used in the mid-1970s to transform stand-up comedy from a cabaret act into a post-modern art.

In fact, Martin seems to be seeking that youthful sensation of limitless possibility that he must have experienced when he was breaking form, the euphoria of feeling one’s own burgeoning gifts stretch out to reach a place that neither the artist nor the unknowing, waiting world has yet conceived.

Martin pinpoints the year, 1904, when the 23-year-old Picasso was overflowing with ideas that produced dozens of startling pencil drawings, the year in which his blue period gave way to rose, and, in Martin’s imagination, the year in which he experienced his first vision of “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon,” the painting that would help usher in the revolution known as Cubism.

In the warm bohemian at atmosphere of a Parisian bar called the Lapin Agile, Picasso (Tim Hopper) realizes his power. “If I think it, I can draw it,” he says. He euphorically describes his connection to all the great artists who came before and, simultaneously, to all of the great artists who will come after.

“So, it’s like a relay?” asks Gaston (Nathan Davis), a beret-wearing Frenchman, exhibiting the playwright’s gift for pleasing absurdities. In fact, it is Martin’s love of play that is “Picasso’s” main character, not the artist or the evening’s other well-known barfly, Albert Einstein (Rick Snyder). Einstein’s theories on a continuum of time and space complement Picasso’s rhapsodic epiphanies about art, but these ideas are merely window dressing on Martin’s own concerns about employing comedy to turn the expected absolutely upside down.

As a new playwright, Martin’s brain works at full throttle as he attacks the boundaries and traditions of theater. When Einstein enters, the bartender Freddy (Tracy Letts) flies into the audience and grabs a program, outraged that the physicist has entered out of the order listed therein. Soon after that Freddy steps forward to explain that he is leaving to take care of a neighbor’s unpaid bar tab and that he may be gone for a longer time than that transaction would normally take. “But,” he patiently explains to the audience, “traditionally, that’s OK.”

Martin’s grapple with the art of playwriting is a worthy battle to behold. He has not, however, won it hands down. His characters chatter riotously (Freddy and his lover Germaine argue whether her Romanticism is post- or neo-), but they are only conceits. Hopper’s studly Picasso comes on as not only the greatest artist but the biggest ego the world has ever produced. He soon blends into the background, though, as each character comes forward to state his particular idea. For one brief moment, when Picasso attempts to mollify a wounded lover, there threatens to be some actual interaction. But that soon passes and the parade of ideas and jokes come on.

When Einstein looks at one of Picasso’s pencil drawings, he sinks in his chair and exclaims, with full understanding of Picasso’s genius, “I never thought the 20th Century would be handed to me so casually.” Yet when he meets Picasso, Einstein seems dubious of the artist’s gifts, as if the playwright could not resist putting that line into Einstein’s mouth but could not follow through on what it meant.

The characters do have brilliant set pieces. Sagot (Alan Wilder), the unscrupulous art dealer, has a great bit about why people will not buy paintings of Jesus. In another, Freddy and Germaine (the wonderful Rondi Reed) take turns predicting the future. “There will be a brief craze for lawn flamingos,” she says, and, going two for two, “Music by four lads from Liverpool!” Freddy isn’t quite as gifted. “Led by Germany, this will be known as the century of peace!”

But the most wonderful of all the set pieces is a brief visit by a huckster named Schmendiman. Exhibiting a spasmodic joy over his discovery of a “very brittle and inflexible” building material called Schmendimite, Schmendiman (Troy Eric West) is a stand-in for Martin’s early stand-up persona, which the comedian once described as “a character with total confidence and nothing to back it up.” Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company re-creates its production here, with arch and fluid direction by artistic director Randall Arney. As Einstein, Snyder delivers a stock old codger, complete with Ed Wynn laugh, but the cast is inventive and fun.

The third genius (it’s definitely not Schmendiman) does arrive, and he shows Picasso a vision of “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon.” The painting lights up the stage, and we are meant to feel its enormous impact on the century and see it as the climactic extension of all of the discussions about genius and art and time that have gone on throughout the evening.

But it’s a problematic painting to feel ecstatic about. Martin has not fully explained what the breakthrough means to Picasso--after all, a visitor from the future has come and handed Picasso the vision. Also, it’s a weirdly angry and, one can’t help noticing, misogynistic image.

Ultimately, it is the joyful huckster Schmendiman who makes the most impact. One senses that Martin could not resist putting himself, if only briefly, in there, mixing it up with his two favorite geniuses. That’s a true act of daring, and one that makes “Picasso” truly worth seeing.

* “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” Westwood Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m., Saturday, 5 and 9 p.m., Sunday, 3 and 7 p.m. No latecomers will be seated. Ends Dec. 4. $10-$30. (310) 208-5454 or Telecharge (800) 233-3123. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Tracy Letts: Freddy

Nathan Davis: Gaston

Rondi Reed: Germaine

Rick Snyder: Einstein

Paula Korologos: Suzanne

Alan Wilder: Sagot

Tim Hopper: Picasso

Troy Eric West: Schmendiman

Joe Sagal: A visitor

The Westwood Playhouse, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Stephen Eich, Joan Stein, Leavitt/Fox Theatricals/Mages and Bette Cerf Hill present a Steppenwolf Theatre Company production. By Steve Martin. Directed by Randall Arney. Sets by Scott Bradley. Lights by Kevin Rigdon. Costumes by Allison Reeds. Sound by Richard Woodbury. Production stage manager Kathryn Loftin.