When Pablo Met Albertby Jack KrollNewsweek, 1994 "Just kept typing and never stopped." Steve Martin is describing his method as a playwright, the newest gig for the brilliant comic / actor / writer. "It came so easily, I'm afraid," he says, almost apologetically. Martin is diffident, reflective, a calm and sober guy. The scene he's chosen reflects this mood: tea at New York's St. Regis Hotel, the gentle plinking of china, the cozy plucking of a harpist. Martin stashes his bicyclist's helmet under the table, orders passion-fruit iced tea and cookies. The play he's describing, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, was premiered last fall by the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and is now at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge Mass.; a one-acter, WASP, was part of the recent Festival of New One-Act Plays at the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York. Both are funny, no surprise, but "Picasso," a fantasy encounter between Picasso and Einstein in a fleabag Paris bar in 1904, may be the most sheerly enjoyable play of the season. The play brings together two of Martin's passions: he's an art collector and a science maven. But why a play and not a movie? "With a play I don't have to be afraid I just blew $25 million of someone else's money," he says. "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." The idea of bringing together the two titans at Picasso's youthful hangout reflects Martin's own experience. "When I started out I hung around a nightclub in L.A. called the Troubador. Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles started there. And I went to the Metropolitan an there's Picasso's painting of the Lapin Agile [The Nimble Rabbit]. I thought of that picture's journey from that little bar to the Met some 40 million dollars later." How did Einstein get in there? "When I started writing," says Martin, "I didn't know Einstein was going to be in it. He just came. So I downloaded his biography on CompuServe. I've always been a science fan - right now I'm reading 'The Quark and the Jaguar,' buy the physicist Murray Gell-Mann. Also I think the creative process in art and science is very similar. You have to forget all the riles and start shaking things around." What makes the play such smart fun is that it's a farce of ideas. Picasso and Einstein are on the verge of their revolutions: the creation of cubism and the publication of The Special Theory of Relativity. In the play, hilariously staged by David Wheeler, Picasso (Bill Camp) and Einstein (Tom Derrah) hurl drawings and equations at each other like intellectual custard pies. The seedy bar becomes a crazy crucible of modernism with its sexy groupies, venal art dealers, false prophets and, in an inspired touch, a climactic visit from the future by an unnamed Singer from Memphis, U.S.A. Martin thinks of himself as a revolutionary, but in reverse. "I think of the Pre-Raphaelites, 19th-century artists who wanted to go back to a style of painting before Raphael. I'm a kind of Pre-Raphaelite who dipped a ladle into the comic past and brought it into the present. When I cam along in the '70s comics were so socially conscious, angry and uptight. My lofty idea was that it was time for someone to sacrifice himself to stupidity. That's what comedy really is, acting stupid so other people can laugh." What he did was to Martinize stupidity into a crazily sweet transcendent force, in his stand-ups and in movies like "The Jerk" and "The Man With Two Brains." Even his Picasso and Einstein are sort of idiot savants, and his comfy middle-class family in "WASP" faces the deepest problems of life with dadaist dizziness. In that play, Dad promises his young Son, with Martinian earnestness: "No matter what you choose to do in life, I'll always be there to shame you." Martin will continue to act (at about $6 million a movie, that's a lot of passion-fruit tea) and write plays "to express my more anarchic side." "I'm 48," he says. "For a while after 'The Jerk' I had a feeling of failure. I was a little scared. First people discover you and they love you. You get big and then you fail. And people are glad that you fail. But I've always come back and I've started to trust myself. You know, there's a cynical view that your whole career is in clips from your films. Well, I figure I've got 20 minutes of good film clips." And about two hours of theater, with more to come. |
