opening-night review of Picasso at the Lapin Agile

at the Spokane Civic's Studio Theatre through Nov. 12

A thoughtful and funny script is given an uneven production in the Civic's current Studio show, Steve Martin's intellectual-absurdist comedy, Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

Absurdist humor shuns self-consciousness. If you perform stupidly ridiculous (and cruelly hurtful) acts, yet demonstrate no awareness of just how laughable and harmful they are -- now that's Kafka, that's Beckett. But if your anxiety is manifest, and your nervousness betrays that you're aware of just how foolish and mean-hearted your acts are, that erases all their absurdity. Then they're simply silly; then they're merely mundane.

On opening night, the Civic's cast let its self-consciousness show. There were several funny episodes, but too often the Civic cast performed like actors fully aware of how hard they had to work to make the audience get the jokes -- when what we need instead are people behaving onstage in ways fully reasonable to them and completely irrational to us. As Einstein might comment, it's all relative.

It's 1904 in a bar in Paris, and in walks not only the master relativist of physics but also the master relativist of art. Einstein and Picasso are both right on the verge of making comparable discoveries -- that the observer changes the observed, that reality isn't anywhere near as solid and graspable as we'd hoped.

Sounds like a scream, doesn't it? But playwright Martin really does ladle on the comedic opportunities -- especially with anachronisms that are out of place in 1904 but outrageously funny with the hindsight of our century of "progress" since. And besides, it's just a smart-guys-getting-drunk-and-getting-told-off-by-the-barmaid kind of play.

Nearly every one of the nine actors has funny bits to go with the missed chances.

As Gaston, the elderly barfly, Fred Strange overemphasizes his bodily woes and malfunctions instead of just behaving them. But Martin lends the old coot some one-liners, and Strange, with his swept-back hair and antic eyes, embodies the oddball.

As the bartender, Bill Mykelbust excels at the comic timing of retorts and insights tossed in from the margins. But his long speech testing Einstein's skills needs to accelerate to warp-speed -- and without self-consciousness.

As the bartender's wife, Darcy Durgan takes too many pauses in her recitation of the wonders that the 20th century will bring -- but in her flirtation scene with Picasso, combining desire with defiance, she nicely toys with a flower even as she's asserting the rights of women.

Tessa Gregory establishes herself as the sort of smart, sexy woman who just might be Picasso's next muse. But one of her monologues -- an erotic crescendo that climaxes on a couch -- seemed mistimed and fell oddly flat.

As an art dealer, Dave Rideout got big laughs with his camera but small ones with his photo album.

As big men in small but showy roles, both Will Gilman and Max Nightser have to remember that a Santa Claus who isn't jolly is just a schlubb. It may not be over until the fat men sing, but they've got to really sing, with no signs of self-criticism apparent. When Santa's down on himself, he's just depressing. And both of these characters -- Schmendiman and the Visitor, both of them con men in their own ways -- are anything but down on themselves.

Again and again, I kept wanting the actors to let go and pursue the outrageous -- not in the sense of hamming it up, but in the sense of behaving in the belief that whims are thoughts, and thoughts actions, and who cares if anyone's confused by my actions? Behave with gusto in the moment, and your excitement will carry out beyond the stage's edge.

In Picasso (which premiered in 1993), Martin provides a script that's probably more cerebral and less farcical than The Underpants, but very much in the thinking-person's-comedy category. The witticisms have to sparkle and flow. The audience will be questioning if they're supposed to laugh at this allusion or that conundrum, so the actors have to guide them with precision. (An Immanuel Kant joke fell flat, but then most of them do.)

There are several laugh-on-top-of-the-last-laugh sequences in this show -- two geniuses have a drawing competition, Einstein suddenly has a big idea. Picasso's vanity is suddenly deflated -- but the difficulty of describing them has to do with how those jokes are in my past but your future. Time isn't linear or absolute, you see....


*****
For more examples of comedic opportunities that peaked or fell flat in this production of "Picasso at the Nimble Rabbit," along with comments on Jeremy Lindholm as Einstein and Paul Villabrille as Picasso, on Peter Hardie's set, on Donovan Stohlberg's direction, and on how the passage of time will change this cast's performance (relatively speaking) -- and even an attempt to write a kind of E = mc[squared] kind of formula for success in comedy -- pick up a copy of the Thursday, Oct. 27 issue of The Pacific Northwest Inlander.