by Aaron Butts
There is excitement brewing in the basement of the campus center this week, as the campus gets ready to attend this semester’s play, a production of Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” which will be performed Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Cabaret Theatre.
“This play is written by Steve Martin, the famous banjo player and comedian, the man who has starred in many movies,” Andrew Protopapas, who is playing one of the lead roles as famous physicist Albert Einstein, said.
“Essentially it takes place in 1904, and it frames the story around Picasso and Einstein meeting before they have really done their big works. So Einstein is still coming up with the theory of relativity. He has the idea but he’s still in the process of refining it. And Picasso is a couple years away from painting the Ladies of Avignon,“ Protopapas said.
Many may be scratching their heads, having never heard of Steve Martin doing anything other than movies. But according to Director Dr. Bill Kennedy, this play is a good one.
“This is his most famous play and the one done most often,” Kennedy said. “When people talk about him as a playwright, this is the play they talk about.”
Kennedy was the one who selected this play because he is a big fan of Steve Martin’s, and this play really reflects a lot of the other work that Martin has done. Even the characters in the play are reminiscent of roles that fans of Martin would recognize.
Byron Mitchell plays such a roll as Charles Dabenow Schendiman, which Kennedy describes as a character similar to Martin’s in his movie “The Jerk.” Mitchell seemed very enthusiastic about his character.
“He’s this kind of idiot inventor,” Mitchell said. “I’m excited and I’m nervous and I just want everyone to come out and see it. It’s one of my last performances here at Capital. It’s been a great experience.”
According to all of the cast and Kennedy, the play is very philosophical in nature, as well as humorous.
“When I first read it,” Mitchell said, “I noticed more of the philosophical ideas such as fulfilling your destiny. I saw more of the philosophical ideas than I did the comedy. But once we started practice I saw the comedy come out and I saw how the comedy and the philosophy intertwined.”
“We’ve been describing it as a philosophical comedy,” Protopapas said. He described the theme of the play as this: “What is genius? Where do art and science connect? And are they really that different?”
One of the biggest themes of the play is this mixing of art and philosophy, which mixes two of Martin’s biggest interests since he is a big art collector, as well as a philosophy major.
“He is a terrific thinker and you get that from his autobiography ‘Born Standing Up’,” Kennedy said.
But Kennedy didn’t want to scare anyone off.
“Watching the play is not like doing homework!” he said. The play is an intriguing mix of both the funny, and the thought provoking.
“You’ll laugh, you’ll think, and it’s free!” Protopapas said.
What is really unique about this play is the way that the audience and the actors interact because unlike other productions, there is no stage and there is no house that separates the actors and the audience.
Instead, because the play is set in a bar, the audience becomes the bar’s patrons and the actors perform amongst them.
“It’s better than sitting and watching a play in Mees hall, this way the audience is more involved,” Kennedy said.
During intermission, snacks will be served to the audience as a kind of dinner theatre. Although Kennedy stressed that it is only snacks because of his unwillingness to ever do dinner theatre in the cabaret again.
“We’ve done dinner theatre before and just thought to ourselves, ‘This is a horrible idea,’” Kennedy said.
The play really does have something interesting to share with its audience, and Kennedy hopes that while people are walking out of the theatre they may ponder the concepts that the play discusses.
And that perhaps some that hadn’t been exposed much to art, science, and philosophy, may see the funnier sides of all three.
abutts@capital.edu
