Meeting of the minds: Picasso and Einstein
Richy Storrs, left, as Albert Einstein, and Andrew Puente as Pablo Picasso in Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” Rehearsal photo by Melissa Mollo
Picasso and Einstein at the speed of light
It’s not often that we find ourselves in the same room as Picasso and Einstein, but there I was, just last weekend, interviewing the two of them. Or rather, I should say, the principal actors in Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” The humorous and intelligent play opens Friday for two weekends at the Norris Theatre in Rolling Hills Estates.
Andrew Puente stars as Picasso and Richy Storrs is Einstein. Also sitting in was the show’s director, Orestes Arcuni.
Guess which bar he’s beckoning us to?
It’s 1904, and a young Albert Einstein, age 25, is a year away from publishing his theory of relativity. Pablo Picasso, a tender 23 but already stirring up embers in the art world, will create his groundsmashing “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907.
Literature is rife with what-ifs of historical figures crossing paths, who never had that luck or luxury in real life, even if, briefly, they were in the same city at the same time (e.g., Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” which opens in 1917 with James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and Tristan Tzara in the Zurich Public Library). At any rate, there’s no indication that Picasso and Einstein ever shared a vermouth at a bar in the City of Light.
“Picasso at the Lapin Agile” is bolstered by a fine supporting cast (names below) that includes Freddy the owner and bartender, his girlfriend and waitress Germaine, plus friends, strangers, and a most unusual visitor. And out of this setting we get a wild and crazy story.
Meet and greet: Albert and Pablo
Each year Palos Verdes Performing Arts presents a three-play series at the Norris Theatre, which usually means one play and two musicals, and this time around producer Chris Gilbert chose Steve Martin’s first play. He also knew who he wanted to direct it: Orestes Arcuni. They’d worked together on this comedy 18 years earlier while in grad school, when Arcuni took the stage as Picasso.
Nearly two decades later, the two men sat across from a procession of actors, hundreds of them auditioning for a role in the play.
“When Richy came in for Einstein,” Arcuni says, “Chris and I looked at each other and said ‘Yup.’ And when Andrew came in for Picasso we said, ‘We got a show!’”
As for the supporting cast, he continues, “People were chosen to best complement each other and the style. A little bit of that is where I come in as a director and I shape what people are bringing to the table. It’s not that another actor wouldn’t have been a perfectly wonderful choice, but maybe not in this play with the rest of the cast.”
Pablo Picasso – At the Lapin Agile, 1905
This writer then mentioned that the play seemed to contain qualities of Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” and Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” (Smart, witty humor in other words)
No one rolls their eyes at my comparison, always a good sign.
“That’s a very acute observation,” Arcuni says, as he explains that Steve Martin has given us the keys to drive the car however we want. Actually, Arcuni uses an altogether different analogy, that of the playground. Martin has set everything in place and now the cast and its director (and the various tech people) can come in and ride the swings or climb the jungle gym.
Now, in any staged work, and especially in a snappy, fast-moving intelligent comedy, the pacing and timing need to be spot-on. With Steve Martin, Storrs says, “You couldn’t ask for a better person to translate rhythmic joy into a play, because it’s so natural to him. When you watch him perform, his voice, the way he does everything, is just so musical.
“There’s not so much outside strenuous work to be done on the rhythm,” he continues, “because it’s threaded right into the words. It’s nice as an actor to have that. You can trust that the comedy is there because of how he put the words together.”
Puente, too, mentions the rhythm of the piece and finding the musicality in it. Martin might be pleased knowing that his name and Shakespeare’s are carrying equal weight in our conversation.
Adding to his opinion that Steve Martin has implicitly given theater companies permission to breathe their own life into the play, Arcuni explains that Puente and Storrs will give the Norris Theatre audience a different experience from any other they may have had of the same work. “No matter how many times you’ve watched it, he says, “you will hear different lines, different relationships.” A line that went unnoticed in one performance suddenly rings clear as a bell in another and opens a new perspective on a scene or maybe even the play as a whole.
“One of the joys of live theater is (that) every time you’re up there is a new performance,” Storrs says. “We’ll do the same show the next night, but [the audience] will never again see exactly that show. That’s one of the things that keeps me always wanting to do live theater.”
Puente echoes this: “It’s always a pursuit of finding something else because we are always hearing new things. And not only that, an audience will be hearing new things; and hearing how an audience responds to a different thing on a different night is just as exciting for us as discovering it for the first time through an audience’s eyes.”
Of course, as viewers, we don’t experience what the actors do because very few of us are attending every performance. But anyone who’s gone back to see the same show will grasp what Storrs and Puente are trying to convey.
Director Orestes Arcuni, center, with (l) Andrew Puente and Richy Storrs. Photo
But let’s focus specifically on their characters, since the two men in the play are based to some extent on real people. Did either of them delve deeply into Picasso and Einstein, or would doing so be unnecessary since the characterizations are rather general at best?
“I’ve been reading the Walter Isaac biography of Einstein and I also did some listening to his voice,” Storrs replies. “But my caveat is that I didn’t think it was so important. In a play like this all the characters are maybe a little bit more Steve Martin than they are Albert Einstein or than they are Picasso.”
Point well taken, as we see with Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Wilson in Woody Allen’s movies. Don’t they come across, first and foremost, as mouthpieces for Allen himself?
“For example,” Storrs says, “you can’t do a full-on German accent. It might destroy that rhythm that Steve Martin made, and it might also not serve the play as well.”
It’s like Hitchcock casting Cary Grant in a movie, Arcuni says. “You don’t cast Cary Grant and expect him to deconstruct himself and do what De Niro does for ‘Raging Bull.’”
The audience, he notes, brings into the theater their ideas of who Picasso and Einstein were and what they contributed to the 20th century. And perhaps that’s enough.
One hundred years plus, and this is what Au Lapin Agile looks like now
In other words, to gain a basic familiarity with their characters but that’s all. (And a good thing, right now. If Picasso were around today there’d be women coming out of the woodwork to shame him for unbecoming behavior)
In contrast to the brilliance of an Einstein or a Picasso we have another “genius,” this one being Charles Dabernow Schmendiman, who makes wild predictions for the century to come, all of them way off the mark.
Towards the end of the play, in case we’ve been nodding off, a Visitor steps into the bar and, what do you know, it’s… Sorry. I’ve been told not to let the cat out of the elevator, but even though this person isn’t named, you’ll have had to have been entombed in a glacier for several thousand years not to recognize him or her. Let’s just say that this person provides some visual and verbal Cubism, theatrical Cubism if that’s possible, and perhaps shakes up the time and space continuum as well. And that brings us to the nature of genius.
“For me, genius is such an interesting thing because I often say my favorite work is a flawed work,” Arcuni says. “It’s flawed work that opens my eyes to something else… So, I think the nature of genius is, you must always be in pursuit of what drives you.”
Lest we think he’s talking about himself, Arcuni stops and says, “Disclaimer here. I’m under no delusion that I have genius. And I’d be very reluctant about handing out that moniker to anyone. But (it’s) certainly worth the investigation and keeping your eyes open looking for it.”
There are many noble (and Nobel) ideas floating about as to what it is exactly that constitutes genius. Well, having discipline and indefatigable energy certainly doesn’t hurt. Then there’s this quote, attributed to the real Picasso, who spills the beans: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
Picasso at the Lapin Agile opens Friday at the Norris Theatre, 27570 Norris Center Drive, Rolling Hills Estates. Performances Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Same schedule next weekend, Feb. 2 to 4. The cast also features Trishia Miller as Germaine and Patrick Vest as Freddy; Richard Perloff as Gaston; Adrian Burks as Picasso’s art dealer Sagot; Kimberly Nicole Wood as Suzanne; Connor Sullivan as Schmendiman; and Bryan Adrian as the Visitor. Tickets, $70 to $30. Call (310) 544-0403 or go to palosverdesperformingarts.com. ER