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StageView: Picasso at the Lapin Agile



A Farce of Ideas 

AUGUST 10, 2009

Steve Martin had already excelled at two careers before he turned his comic mind to playwriting.  As a stand-up comedian with an arrow through his head he conquered clubs and arenas from coast to coast and left indelible impressions on countless funnybones with his legendary appearances on Saturday Night Live—cue “King Tut” music.  

Martin left the lonely life of the road for Hollywood where he found success as an actor and writer of screenplays with such films as The Jerk, Bowfinger, L.A. Story, Roxanne, Shopgirl, and more recently, remakes of The Pink Panther. Along the way, he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker and published two novellas, Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company as well as the non-fiction works Cruel Shoes, Pure Drivel and the memoir Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.

Picasso at the Lapin Agile represents Martin’s first foray into the world of playwriting.  The comedy had its world premiere at Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theatre in October 1993, followed by productions in Los Angeles, Boston and Off-Broadway in New York.  It has since had numerous international productions and become a staple of American regional theatres, and for good reason.  As Variety’s Jeremy Gerard noted in his review of the New York production: “Picasso at the Lapin Agile has the virtues, seldom seen these days, of an old-fashioned matinee comedy: There are plenty of laughs, a little romance, a little nostalgia—and it makes the audience feel smart.”

That the laughs should come fast and furious is certainly no surprise for a work from the pen of Martin.  That the play makes the audience feel smart has much to do with the subject matter along with the reasons the comedian turned his attention to the theatre.  

Picasso at the Lapin Agile supposes a meeting between two undisputed giants of the twentieth century.  In one corner representing art is Pablo Picasso; in the other, representing science, is Albert Einstein.   The meeting occurs one evening in 1904, just before either has had the creative breakthrough that will place him among the luminaries of the century.  For Picasso that would be painting the groundbreaking cubist work Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) and for Einstein it is the appearance of his revolutionary paper, “The Special Theory of Relativity” (1905).

The place of the fictitious encounter is the real-life Montmartre café The Lapin Agile, which serves food, drink and entertainment to this day.  In 1904, the café was a noted hangout for young bohemian artists, writers and intellectuals, including Picasso who maintained an atelier nearby in an old piano factory.  For the record, at that time, Einstein, unable to secure an academic appointment, was employed as a clerk in the Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland.

By setting the play in 1904, Martin can address, as he once noted, “how exciting it is when you’re on the verge of something.”  His 25-year-old Einstein and his 23-year-old Picasso are full of the energy, exuberance and egotism befitting young geniuses who, even at such tender ages, are certain of their significance to the development of the new century.  It is not merely these two individuals who are on the verge of “something,” it is the whole world that will be shaped by the ideas parried about at Martin’s Lapin Agile.  

In keeping with the light tone of the comedy, however, the ideas are presented in easily digestible forms.  You don’t need to be Einstein to get the jokes.  Martin makes noteworthy observations but he serves them with abundant silliness.  Vincent Canby observed in his New York Times review: “Martin’s manner is to so mix the sublime with the ridiculous that they can’t be easily disentangled.”

In the play the sublime tends toward allusions to the fourth dimension, the genesis of ideas and the beauty that describes great art and informs original scientific theories.  Martin once explained to Newsweek’s Jack Kroll that he believes the “creative process in art and science is very similar.  You have to forget all the rules and start shaking things around.”  Writing the play, he added, gave him the opportunity to explore his interest in science and art away from the pressures and limitations of the Hollywood film industry.

“With a play I don’t have to be afraid I just blew $25 million of someone else’s money,” he explained to Kroll.  “When I write a screenplay, the premise is get in, get out, and don’t stop to say anything.  But a play is anything you can get away with.”

For Martin the process of playwriting was enjoyable and enlightening.

“I found that when I started writing plays there was a different me, something else came out,” he told Linda MacColl in an American Theatre interview.  “The subjects are more important to me.  The language that I use is completely different.  The topics that I tackle are more special—or even esoteric.”

He added: “Playwriting, you can do a 10-minute dissertation on the inner tube if you can make it interesting.”  

Interesting and uproariously funny, as is usually the case with Martin, certainly applies here. Martin populates his Lapin Agile (French for Nimble Rabbit) with an array of supporting characters who unabashedly spout a spectrum of views from pointedly down-to-earth to wonderfully and bizarrely self-deluded.  Einstein and Picasso are not the only “geniuses” bellying up to the bar, and moments of creative rapture are routinely pierced by sharp reality checks.   Jack Kroll aptly noted: “What makes the play such smart fun is that it is a farce of ideas.”

In that sense, Picasso at the Lapin Agile may be seen as part of the progression in the comedy of Steve Martin.  For all the silliness and self-proclaimed stupidity—an arrow through the head or bunny ears up top—Martin’s comedy has always been about ideas.  In his memoir Born Standing Up, he describes two pivotal breakthrough moments in the development of his act.  The first involved opening a textbook in logic class and discovering Lewis Carroll’s syllogisms, which were “absolutely logical” and funny at the same time.  They expanded Martin’s concept of comedy’s potential.  

The second breakthrough came when he decided to remove the punchlines from his comedy routines.  Instead of completing jokes, he would simply move on to the next part of his act and let the people in the audience laugh when they wanted, in essence relinquishing control by creating a void where iron-clad timing normally reigned.  The matter may have been madness, but the method was revolutionary.  Martin told Kroll that “comedy really is acting stupid so other people can laugh.” Kroll countered that what Martin actually had achieved “was to Martinize stupidity into a crazily sweet transcendent force.”

Again, Kroll got it right and his description of Martin’s comedy captures the appeal of Picasso at the Lapin Agile.  It’s comically stupid, crazy, sweet, and yes, transcendent in the way it celebrates the beauty of bringing a new idea into being. “We are creating new ways of looking at the world,” says Einstein in the play.  Steve Martin has long been looking for —and finding—new ways to make us laugh. If, in the doing, he gives us a notion to go to the Museum of Modern Art and gaze at Les Demoiselles D’Avignon or to look up at the night sky and ponder the vast dimensions and laws of the universe, well then, that may explain why the arrow goes through the head.

 -JOSEPH WHELAN