Picasso at the Lapin Agile

Picasso at the Lapin Agile – Steve Martin’s play is, apparently, one of the most produced theater-works in the country. It’s unostentatious, utilizes only a single set, and has a pleasing array of interesting, broadly written characters. In a proper production, the play provides an opportunity for actors of various ages and dispositions to perform together. There’s nothing controversial in the show and its only mildly bawdy. In short, it’ is pretty much ideal for community theater. But, I think that there is a more central, and problematic, reason why this show is so frequently mounted. Martin’s play features a kind of comedy that is very familiar to most of us – it is an extended version of a Saturday Night Live skit with all the merits and limitations inherent to the form. A typical SNL skit features caricatures of celebrities (sometimes performed by the very celebrity caricatured) interacting with other celebrities in a skit that is witty, shallow, and intended to be mildly satirical – as invention flags, SNL skits tend to veer into absurdity or the surreal. The banter is au courant, brittle, and sardonic. But the form works best in a ten minute format – and Picasso at the Lapin Agile is about eighty minutes long. Martin doesn’t have a play, but an extended SNL sketch, a skit based on a situation that can’t develop; the entire appeal of the enterprise is the mash-up between specimen-geniuses that, superficially, don’t seem to belong together. Martin extends the material by injecting additional representative men into his scenario – when it becomes apparent that the encounter between Picasso and Einstein has nowhere to go, he inserts a baffling character, apparently intended to represent capitalist enterprise, and, then, a character frequently appearing as a deus ex machina when the author has nothing left to say – a dead Elvis. (I am thinking of other works that involve Elvis’ ghost – for instance, Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.) Martin writes mildly amusing, dry and cerebral banter. He aims for epigrams but he’s not Oscar Wilde or Tom Stoppard the past-master of this sort of play (an encounter between Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin represents the raison d’etre for Stoppard’s Jumpers). Martin is one of the great masters of physical comedy. Accordingly, it’s curious that Picasso is physically inert, more of an oratorio than a play. In the version that I saw, the characters remained rooted to their positions on stage, rarely moving – the play’s choreography is badly stilted, repetitious, and uninvolving. Ultimately, the piece can’t sustain its length and the fragility of its premise – it’s a wee bit tedious. It’s a play of ideas, but the ideas are a banal and superficial. Picasso, Einstein, and the others are instantly recognizable – this is required in TV sketch comedy – but they are caricatures, not intended to be three-dimensional protagonists. Martin is nostalgic about the late-lamented twentieth century. The play ends with a toast to modern times, to the new twentieth century – in fact, the final scene uniting all the characters at the footlights is like the sort of septet or chorus that might end a comic opera by Mozart or Rossini. One reflects that a similar play about the first years of the 21st century would not be so hopeful, brave, and optimistic – the toast would be to fallen towers, military tribunals, torture, and mortgage refinance derivatives. But this is unduly Euro- (Americo?)-centric. I suppose that there is some little bodega in Mumbai or Beijing where the great luminaries of the age to come might be imagined to be gathered and cheerfully interacting in year 2003 – who knows? (I saw the play at Summerset Theater in a community theater production on Wednesday, July 11, 2012; I thought the play was as well-mounted as possible given the resources and the cast was enthusiastic and effective.)