Paris match

For Steve Martin, the play's the thing

by Bill Rodriguez

For a guy who spent the formative part of his career chatting amiably to us with an arrow through his head, Steve Martin sure has ambitions. Like Woody Allen with his occasional serio-comic if not Bergmanesque films, Martin wants to show us that there's more than a clown inside him. We'll get a chance to judge for ourselves when the playwright's Picasso at the Lapin Agile comes to the Providence Performing Arts Center November 18-23.

The one-act asks the question: What if Pablo Picasso (Paul Provenza) and Albert Einstein (Mark Nelson) had met in Paris in their early 20s, before their work was celebrated? How might they stake claim to their respective genius? It's set in 1904, the year before the Special Theory of Relativity was published, three years before "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon" and the birth of Cubism. We're in the bistro Lapin Agile, which Picasso was known to frequent. (The two met only later in life.)

Picasso is cocky, entertaining and badly in need of a date. Einstein, when he eventually enters, is also self-impressed as well as bemused, yet able to be awed by a drawing Picasso has just dashed off to dazzle a pretty young woman. Other colorful characters enter, such an a boorish inventor, Schmendiman, who insists that little lasts in the memory of history, and an art dealer with notions to the contrary. The major change from the play's premiere performance was the addition of a culminating scene, involving a surprise character listed only as the Visitor. The addition was suggested to Martin by Robert Brustein, drama critic for The New Republic. (And also artistic director of American Repertory Theater, in Cambridge, which staged the play that had been tentatively announced by Richard Jenkins for Trinity Rep's 1993-94 season.)

Unfortunately, Martin's 1994 debut as a theatrical wordsmith came after playwriting luminary Tom Stoppard's Travesties. That 1974 comedy asked the question: What if James Joyce, Lenin and Dada poet Tristan Tzara met in Zurich in 1918? Stoppard answered the question brilliantly, hilariously, and with conceptual depth.

So an additional question quickly arose. Was Martin the real thing or just Playwright Lite? One of those LA cocktail party posers? Not to mention a plot pilferer. As Brad Leithauser protested in Time, "Picasso's one-liners aren't so much fireworks as kitchen matches." Vincent Canby in the New York Times said there were lots of good gags among the "obvious or irrelevant" ones, yet as a whole Martin's effort played like an extended Saturday Night Live sketch. Other critics concurred, but most assessments of Picasso were at least respectful. In Newsday it was chucked under the chin as a "breezy and impressive first play." Even Canby found the characters likable.

Steve Martin

Of Martin's three other plays, one is a 10-minute satire, Romeo and Juliet at Antioch, which examines how the star-crossed lovers might cope under the strict Antioch College rules of dating. Wasp is about and a middle-class family in the '50s. And the third one-act, Patter for the Floating Lady, is about a magician who worries his lover into fleeing, then waxes despondent about love's inevitable, dismal passing away.

The touring show of Picasso, Martin's first full-length play, should be definitive. Not only is it directed by Randall Arney, who has shaped it from its development and premiere at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre through Los Angeles and New York productions, but its Einstein is Mark Nelson, who has garnered universal kudos in the role.

Steve Martin, as he established long ago, has never been wildly crazy about being interviewed. But last month he was a good sport at a press conference at the Four Seasons hotel in Boston, helping to kick off the tour. When Martin entered the meeting room and faced the pack, the weak smile he forced out could have been missed if you blinked. But he soon got with the program.

With humor, of course. Asked if there were any correlations between characters and events in the play and real life, he responded, "Yes," and turned to another questioner for a beat before continuing. The basics were covered. His inspiration for the play?

"Well, I had a lifelong interest in art and science. It sort of coalesced into this play," he said. "At the same time, I'd been going to plays in New York and I'd hear the audience laugh, and I'd think, `You, know, this would be a real test, to make an audience laugh this way.'

"I grew up in stand-up comedy," he continued. "I've always listened to the audience. That's the way it's always worked for me. And I thought it would be interesting to write something, then sit back and really listen, see how it goes."

Martin has earned an impressive reputation for his screenplays. He has written seven of the more than two dozen films he's starred in. His first attempt at being on both sides of the filmscript was in 1979 with The Jerk, back when he relied more on funny faces and silly walks than he has in recent work. His writing for Roxanne in 1987 and LA Story in 1991 (the latter took him seven years) gained even more praise than his skillful and subdued acting in those films.

Why risk failure with stage plays, he was asked, after success with all those screenplays?

"Well, two things," he began. "One was the live audience idea. I just wanted to do something in that arena. Also, you can discuss more things in a play then you can in a screenplay. A screenplay is about moving on and getting away as fast as possible. In a play, you can sit there and discuss an inner tube, if it's interesting."

He said that in working on Picasso he felt little pressure, because he didn't think it would ever be produced. But once he was involved in the writing, he said, "It was an interesting process to sit and see who came through the door next."

Each of those characters represented a particular viewpoint. "Freddie the bartender, he got to be kind of cynical, laissez faire," Martin explained. "And there is Germaine, the barmaid, who represents a wiser, older version of the young girl Suzanne, who's enchanted with Picasso. I'm usually identified as Schmendiman. People say that's me, the guy who pretends, who thinks he's a genius but isn't really," Martin cracked, to more supportive laughter. But there wasn't an arrow in sight.