Pablo and Al

Lapin Agile's two wild and crazy guys

by Bill Rodrgiguez

PICASSO AT THE LAPIN AGILE. By Steve Martin. Directed by Brien Lang. With Laurent Y. Andruet, Mark Anthony, Nicole DeRosa, Russell Kellogg, Henrik Kromann, Victor Lavenstein, William Oakes, David Tessier, and Dana Ventetuolo. At NewGate Theatre through March 28.

Entertainment that doesn't pretend to be more than a lark can be a godsend. (Ask anyone who self-medicates with their worn-out copy of Grease.) But when a play starts teasing us with ideas, it better deliver. Directed by Brien Lang, Picasso At the Lapin Agile may strike you as facile or please you as thought-provoking. But the current NewGate Theatre production certainly will make you laugh, even if at times against your better judgment.

Master of surreal comedy Steve Martin wrote it, so you know that most of his loopy gags are going to bypass your left brain anyway. The premise has potential. It's 1904 Paris. What if the 25-year-old Pablo Picasso -- at the full flower of ego but three years before his most radical Cubist kick in the head, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon -- at his favorite bar meets 23-year-old Swiss patent clerk Albert Einstein, the year before he published his revolutionary paper on the special theory of relativity? What could they thrash out about the shape of the dawning century, about the importance of art vs. science, about the brilliance of their rising stars?

As we all know, Picasso was a womanizer as well as a creative genius, and we meet him first through one of his conquests. Suzanne (Nicole DeRosa) is a pretty blond who shows up hoping to meet him again. She had been seduced by his drawing a dove on the back of her hand with his fingernail. (Speaking of the Gallic tradition of cheating on mates, Dana Ventetuolo is refreshing gender equitability as Germaine, the barmaid and girlfriend of Freddy the bartender.)

Einstein (Henrik Kromann) soon shows up, awaiting a date and bubbling with pride over the world-transforming publication he is working on. (Make sure it's funny, someone suggests.) The character also has one of the play's most potentially powerful theatrical moments, which unfortunately isn't ignited in this staging. Einstein is examining a drawing tossed off by Picasso for Suzanne, and he is stunned at holding the 20th century in his hands: "scratched out in pencil on a piece of paper . . . Tools thousands of years old, waiting for someone to move them in just this way." But neither the pacing, acting or lighting lets awe emerge.

The Picasso of both the playwright and of the actor Laurent Y. Andruet ably holds the stage when he finally arrives. Art-collector Martin gives him some excellent lines. "It's all in the wrist. And the wrist starts here," Picasso says, tapping his head. Andruet fills him with a buoyant self-regard that is too outer-directed and enthusiastic to be mere egotism. After the two men compete ("Draw!"), both appreciate the resulting drawing and equation as having miraculously circumvented space and time. In a marvelous paean to creativity, Picasso exults at how the pencil pokes through the paper, "sucks up the future" and deposits that future back onto the paper.

Everybody is concerned about the future in this play. Sagot (Mark Anthony Brown), the art dealer, knows by faith that posterity will reward his discerning eye. Even bartender Freddy (Victor Lavenstein, superbly blending surliness and amiability) is a seer: "Led by Germany, this will be known as the century of peace! Clothes will be made of wax!" A Visitor from the future (David Tessier) joins in toward the end, in a cute surprise I don't want to spoil. But the most farsighted is the oafish, glad-handing Schmendiman (Russell Kellogg), who dresses, talks and thinks like a carnival barker. He trumpets his "inflexible building material . . . made of asbestos, kitten paws and radium" that will transform the century. Sigh. There's no arguing with progress.

Would Picasso At the Lapin Agile have been produced if the playwright weren't a celebrity? Maybe not. Much too often, Martin doesn't as much explore ideas as decorate with them, as when philosopher Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason comes up for no point but to name-drop, and by an unlikely character. (That's William Oakes' Gaston, whose main comic contribution is having to pee a lot.) When Martin brings up a subject like quantum physics changing perceived reality, you wish he'd hand the word processor over to Tom Stoppard, who would go somewhere substantial with the topic. (Stoppard, in his 1974 Travesties, had James Joyce, Lenin and Dada poet Tristan Tzara meet in Zurich in 1918, to hilarious and trenchant effect.)

But for a guy who used to make his living with a fake arrow through his head, Martin's done OK. For chapter headings about Ideas to come out of Hollywood is a welcome sign, here at the end of the millennium. In another thousand years, the actual ideas themselves may do so.