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Einstein meets Picasso in ATC production
ANNE BRADY
Associate Editor
Sure, Michael Santo looks like he's portraying Albert Einstein. He's got the hair and the mustache. And he's even got something resembling a German accent going, albeit on and off. But once he starts acting, it sure seems like he's doing Steve Martin - Steve Martin doing Albert Einstein, that is.
Then there's actor Jared Sakren who's supposed to be playing Clovis Sagot, an art dealer passionate about Picasso's work. Only Sakren seems to be doing Jon Lovitz - doing Sagot.
Although many of the actors seem to be involved in outrageous attempts to model their acting styles after famous comedians who used to appear on "Saturday Nigh Live," the distraction does not detract much from what for the most part is a very entertaining production of the 90-minute play, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," written by Steve Martin and presented by Arizona Theatre Company at the Herberger Theater Center through Oct. 24.
The play is presented without an intermission, as it is relatively short and is set all in one room - a bar in Paris called the Lapin Agile ("Nimble Rabbit"), which was, in fact, frequented by Pablo Picasso. The premise is that Picasso meets Einstein in the bar in 1904 - when they were both in their 20s, right before they accomplished great things.
Einstein is established immediately as a theorist, when he explains that even though he has agreed to meet a countess for a drink at a different Paris bar, he is waiting for her here because it is just as likely that she will accidentally arrive at the Lapin Agile as at the bar he specified, since she thinks like him.
Meanwhile, Picasso is established out of the chute as a great lover of women and as a charismatic, artistic genius - not by anything he says, but by what others say about him before he even arrives.
Stephanie Shine renders a thoroughly delightful performance as not one, but three very different female characters. Roberto Guajardo is fabulous as bar regular Gaston, the "Norm" of Paris, 1904. And Gerald Burgess and Deborah Van Valkenburgh do a respectable job as husband-and-wife bar owners Freddy and Germaine. They bring a lot of energy to their roles, but Burgess is so enthusiastic at times that it seems he is about to burst into song.
For the most part, the play breezes along, with the various characters making their observations on the nature of relationships and human existence. They are all pretty one-dimensional, but their verbal jousting is delightful.
Suddenly, the character listed in the program as "a visitor" arrives. Apparently, the identity of the visitor is supposed to be a secret until the character actually appears on stage, so I won't spoil the surprise. Suffice to say that the visitor really doesn't belong in the play and doesn't add much in the way of humor.
The visitor is Martin's version of the classic Greek device deus ex machina, God from machine, in which God in some form comes down from the sky to wrap up all the loose ends and conveniently save the day. But these characters don't need to be saved from their play with a contrived ending. They've spent an evening conversing in a bar (where better?) and could just as easily be shuffled out the door by Freddy (or by Burgess doing Ted Danson doing Freddy), telling them it's time he closed up for the night, and sending them out into the streets of Paris to paint, to invent, to theorize, to joke, to banter, and to love.
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