A Director's Perspective

“This is the night the earth fell quiet and listened to a conversation…”

Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a deceptively simple play. At a mere 75 pages, it is a wisp of a one-act, taking place entirely in one evening and in one location, with a central cast of characters that barely leaves the stage. As we quickly come to discover, however, there is far more to this story. Written by the incomparable Steve Martin, Picasso—much like the artist’s famous paintings—is far more than meets the eye.

The show seamlessly blends realism and absurdity, past and present. At no point are these inconsistencies and anachronisms explained, apologized, or justified—they are merely an a priori part of the world Steve Martin weaves. Furthermore, this blending and blurring of time, space, and place are all absolutely essential to the story Steve Martin is telling. Only in this world could Picasso, Einstein, and Elvis all share a mutual moment of revelation in a Parisian bar in 1904.

This play is about the expansion of ideas, the breaking of borders, and the pushing forwards towards and exploration of things new. Picasso and Einstein believed that art and science were means for exploring worlds beyond perceptions, beyond appearances. As these two geniuses and the host of other characters at the Lapin Agile discuss the dawning of a new century, groundbreaking ideas are what matter. Sagot—a character stuck firmly in the past— says that it is the frame, “the boundaries, the edge” that make a painting great. He insists that one has to “stay within the borders to make it interesting.” These worn out notions of restriction represent exactly the kind of bounded thinking that the forward-focused genius of Picasso and Einstein went on to break down in the 20th century.

Even more remarkable, Picasso and Einstein were very much working on breaking down the same walls, solving the same problems—just by different means. Clearly this play is a meditation on the nature of genius, and it is undeniable that modern science is founded on the genius of Einstein and modern art is founded on the genius of Picasso. But aside from these obvious facts, what is perhaps the most significant discovery this play’s meditation on genius brings to light is that Picasso and Einstein—both in their 20s, both about to have the most remarkable breakthroughs of their careers—held far more intellectual similarities than they did intellectual differences. Indeed, the play reveals that they are not counter-poised against each other, but are rather complements of one another. It is not art versus science—it is art through science, and science through art.

Indeed, as Arthur Miller writes in his book Picasso, Einstein: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc, Einstein's approach to space and time was not primarily mathematical. Notions of aesthetics were essential to his discovery in 1905 of relativity and a new representation for light, and then in 1907 of a means to widen relativity theory to include gravity. Nor were Picasso's studies of space totally artistic in the narrow sense of this term, as his interest in scientific developments reveals. Picasso's new aesthetic for his great work, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, was the reduction of forms to geometry.

These striking similarities form just one of the many layers placed within the pages of Martin’s play. Through humor, he allows his audience to find a place in the Lapin Agile along side Picasso, Einstein, Gaston, Freddy, Germaine, and the rest. The audience is brought into this evening conversation just as actively as those on stage, getting to laugh and ponder in equal measure along with those enjoying the evening in the Lapin Agile.




Notes for Designers

I would love to takes these concepts of expanding borders, playing with anachronisms, and toying with elements of space and time… and translate them into the designs.

The color story this show tells is very true to Picasso’s painting of the Lapin Agile, which is below (Au Lapin Agile). The only adjustment I would make is to imagine replacing the orange elements in the picture with deep reds instead—I see the particular shade of orange in the painting as a bit too garish for our purposes. The colors that this play evokes are deep reds, deep yellows, deep oranges, and various woody earth tones.

The Lapin Agile itself should feel underground, slightly seedy, and bordello-esque. Deep red wall paper, an old wooden bar, and—since it is an intellectual and artistic think tank—the walls should be cluttered with paintings, sketches, and other various things the owner of the Lapin Agile has gotten from his patrons over the years.

Below are some various images I found inspiring when thinking about the show:

Biography of Pablo Picasso

Born Pablo Ruiz y Picasso on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. Picasso is considered to be one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. While he showed great artistic promise growing up, Picasso really began to thrive creatively once he moved to Paris in the early 1900s. There he was exposed to works of other artists and developed friendships with some of them, including Georges Braque.

With a career that spanned more than seven decades, Picasso's work is often categorized into different periods and associated with a number of artistic movements. His early days in Paris coincide with his Blue period, named for the predominant use of that color in his work and his general mood at that time. This was followed by his Rose period and a brief dabbling in work inspired by primitive art. It was Cubism—the style in which the artist breaks down his or her subjects into geometric shapes—that put Picasso in the spotlight. One of his paintings in this style Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) shocked critics and friends alike when it was exhibited.

Later Picasso sought a different type of reaction from his painting Guernica (1937), which is thought to be one of Picasso's greatest works. Created during his Surrealist period, Picasso captures the horror of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, which killed many innocent civilians during the Spanish Civil War.

By the end of World War II, Picasso had become an internationally known artist and celebrity. A highly productive artist, he created a large number of works during his lifetime. Besides painting, he made sculptures, etchings, and many different types of prints.

While Picasso died on April 8, 1973, in Antibes, France, interest in his art continues to grow. Highly regarded, Picasso's work is in many major museums around the world, including the Louvre in Paris, and has sold for millions of dollars at auction.

Biography of Albert Einstein

The German-American physicist Albert Einstein, (1879-1955) contributed more than any other scientist to the 20th-century vision of physical reality. In the wake of World War I, Einstein's theories--especially his theory of relativity--seemed to many people to point to a pure quality of human thought, one far removed from the war and its aftermath. Seldom has a scientist received such public attention for having cultivated the fruit of pure learning.

EARLY LIFE

Einstein's parents, who were nonobservant Jews, moved from Ulm to Munich when Einstein was an infant. The family business was the manufacture of electrical apparatus; when the business failed (1894), the family moved to Milan, Italy. At this time Einstein decided officially to relinquish his German citizenship. Within a year, still without having completed secondary school, Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to pursue a course of study leading to a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (the Zurich Polytechnic). He spent the next year in nearby Aarau at the cantonal secondary school, where he enjoyed excellent teachers and first-rate facilities in physics. Einstein returned in 1896 to the Zurich Polytechnic, where he graduated (1900) as a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics.

After a lean two years he obtained a post at the Swiss patent office in Bern. The patent-office work required Einstein's careful attention, but while employed (1902-09) there, he completed an astonishing range of publications in theoretical physics. For the most part these texts were written in his spare time and without the benefit of close contact with either the scientific literature or theoretician colleagues. Einstein submitted one of his scientific papers to the University of Zurich to obtain a Ph.D. degree in 1905. In 1908 he sent a second paper to the University of Bern and became privatdocent, or lecturer, there. The next year Einstein received a regular appointment as associate professor of physics at the University of Zurich.

By 1909, Einstein was recognized throughout German-speaking Europe as a leading scientific thinker. In quick succession he held professorships at the German University of Prague and at the Zurich Polytechnic. In 1914 he advanced to the most prestigious and best-paying post that a theoretical physicist could hold in central Europe: professor at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin. Although Einstein held a cross-appointment at the University of Berlin, from this time on he never again taught regular university courses. Einstein remained on the staff at Berlin until 1933, from which time until his death (1955) he held an analogous research position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.

SCIENTIFIC WORK

The 1905 Papers

In the first of three seminal papers published in 1905, Einstein examined the phenomenon discovered by Max Planck, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in quantities that were ultimately discrete. The second of Einstein's 1905 papers proposed what is today called the special theory of relativity. The third of Einstein's seminal papers of 1905 concerned statistical mechanics.

The General Theory of Relativity

After 1905, Einstein continued working in all three of the above areas. He made important contributions to the quantum theory, but increasingly he sought to ex

tend the special theory of relativity to phenomena involving acceleration. After a number of false starts, he published (late 1915) the definitive form of the general theory. In its original form, Einstein's general relativity has been verified numerous times in the past 60 years, especially during solar-eclipse expeditions when Einstein's light-deflection prediction could be tested.

LATER LIFE

When British eclipse expeditions in 1919 confirmed his predictions, Einstein was lionized by

the popular press. Einstein's personal ethics also fired public imagination. Einstein, who after returning to Germany in 1914 did not reapply for German citizenship, was one of only a handful of German professors who remained a pacifist and did not support Germany's war aims. After the war, when the victorious allies sought to exclude German scientists from international meetings, Einstein--a Jew traveling with a Swiss passport--remained an acceptable German envoy. Einstein's political views as a pacifist and a Zionist pitted him against conservatives in Germany, who branded him a traitor and a defeatist. The public success accorded his theories of relativity evoked savage attacks in the 1920s by the anti-Semitic physicists Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, men who after 1932 tried to create a so-called Aryan physics in Germany. Just how controversial the theories of relativity remained for less flexibly minded physicists is

revealed in the circumstances surrounding Einstein's reception of a Nobel Prize in 1921--it was awarded not for relativity but for his 1905 work on the photoelectric effect.

With the rise of fascism in Germany, Einstein moved (1933) to the United States and abandoned his pacifism. He reluctantly agreed that the new menace had to be put down through force of arms. In this context Einstein sent (1939) a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that urged that the United States proceed to develop an atomic bomb before Germany did. The letter, composed by Einstein's friend Leo Szilard, was one of many exchanged between the White House and Einstein, and it contributed to Roosevelt's decision to fund what became the Manhattan Project.

However much he appeared to the public as a champion of unpopular causes, such as his objection in the 1950s to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and his efforts toward nuclear disarmament, Einstein's central concerns always revolved around physics. At the age of 59, when other theoretical physicists would long since have abandoned original scientific research, Einstein and his co-workers Leopold Infeld and Banesh Hoffmann achieved a major new result in the general theory of relativity.

Until the end of his life Einstein sought a unified field theory, whereby the phenomena of gravitation and electromagnetism could be derived from one set of equations. Few physicists followed Einstein's path in the years after 1920. Quantum mechanics, instead of general relativity, drew their attention. For his part, Einstein could never accept the new quantum mechanics with its principle of indeterminacy, as formulated by Werner Heisenberg and elaborated into a new epistemology by Niels Bohr. Although Einstein's later thoughts were neglected for decades, physicists today refer seriously and awesomely to Einstein's dream--a grand unification of physical theory.

The Idiots' Guide to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity

It's the most important theory of the 20th century. It identifies that light always travels at the same speed (186,000 miles per second - the fastest velocity in the universe). Speed is relative - it only tells you how fast something is moving relative to something else. As a train goes by at right angles to us, its speed can be measured. But imagine moving towards an oncoming train at the same speed - it would seem to be moving twice as fast. Light, however, doesn't behave in the same way: its speed is constant, regardless of the speed of its source or observer. Time passes differently, depending on whether you are moving or still. The faster you move, the slower your clock ticks compared with that of someone stationary. If a clock was in a spaceship that was travelling at the speed of light (if that were possible), the clock would stop Relativity also gave us one of the world's best- known equations: E = mc2. It predicts the energy (E) released from a mass (m), or object, when it is annihilated. C is the speed of light. Einstein's theory prompted man to split the atom, ultimately resulting in the creation of the atomic bomb and the nuclear age. Einstein's thinking radically changed our understanding of the universe, causing revolutions in particle physics, the idea of black holes, and the thinking behind Big Bang. And just when you thought you were beginning to understand, last month Dr Alphonsus Kelly of University College, Dublin, challenged the very heart of Einstein's theory: he believes the speed of light is not constant. But deconstructing a genius isn't easy, and Dr Kelly has yet to convince the sceptical academic world.

A very... special version of "Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay!"

Here is a very... unique... rendition of the song Gaston comes in humming at the beginning of Picasso





Here is some more information on the song:

"Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay" is a vaudeville and music hall song, copyrighted by Henry J. SayersLottie Collins in London music halls in 1892. and first performed in 1891. The song was best known in the version sung by

The song's authorship was disputed for some years, and was the subject of a lawsuit in the 1930s. It originally appeared credited to Sayers, who was the manager of a minstrel troupe, and was sung by Mamie Gilroy in a minstrel farce comedy in 1891. However, Sayers later stated that he had not written the song, but had heard it performed in the 1880s by a black singer, Mama Lou, in a well-known St. Louis brothel run by "Babe" Connors. The 1930s lawsuit decided that the tune and the refrain were in the public domain.^[1]

Sayers gave the song to Lottie Collins, who worked up a routine around it, with new words by Richard Morton and a new arrangement by Angelo A. Asher, and performed it to great acclaim in London in 1892 in a revue, Miss Helyett. According to reviews at the time, Collins delivered the suggestive verses with deceptive demureness, before launching into the lusty refrain and her celebrated "kick dance", a kind of cancan in which, according to one reviewer, "she turns, twists, contorts, revolutionizes, and disports her lithe and muscular figure into a hundred different poses, all bizarre...."^[1]

Around 1914 Joe Hill wrote a version which tells the tale of how poor working conditions can lead workers into "accidentally" causing their machinery to have mishaps.

The tune is widely recognizable and has been used for numerous other songs, including children's camp songs and military ballads from the early 20th century. According to enotes.com, it is Nonsense march song.^[2] It was used for the theme song to the show Howdy Doody, and more recently by the Mariachi-tuned Dilly Sisters on the 1960s children variety show The Banana Splits.

A 1945 British film of the same name describes the history of music hall theatre.

Picasso, Why You So Blue?

Here is some information on Picasso's "Blue Period", as often referenced in the show.

The Blue Period (Spanish: Periodo Azul) of Picasso is the period between 1900 and 1904, when he painted essentially monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. These somber works, inspired by Spain but painted in Paris, are now some of his most popular works, although he had difficulty selling them at the time.

This period's starting point is uncertain; it may have begun in Spain in the spring of 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year.^[1] In choosing austere color and sometimes doleful subject matter—prostitutes, beggars and drunks are frequent subjects—Picasso was influenced by a journey through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas, who took his life at the L’Hippodrome Café in Paris, France by shooting himself in the right temple on February 17, 1901. Although Picasso himself later recalled, "I started painting in blue when I learned of Casagemas's death",^[2] art historian Hélène Seckel has written: "While we might be right to retain this psychologizing justification, we ought not lose sight of the chronology of events: Picasso was not there when Casagemas committed suicide in Paris ... it was only in the fall that this dramatic event emerged in his painting, with several portraits of the deceased".^[3]

Starting in the latter part of 1901 he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie, painted in 1903 and now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.^[4] The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904), which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness is a recurrent theme in Picasso's works of this period, also represented in The Blindman's Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other frequent subjects include female nudes and mothers with children.

Possibly his most well known work from this period is The Old Guitarist. Other major works include Portrait of Soler (1903) and Las dos hermanas (1904). Picasso's Blue Period was followed by his Rose Period.

The painting Portrait of Suzanne Bloch (1904), one of the final works from this period, was stolen from the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) on December 20, 2007, but retrieved on January 8, 2008.

Picasso Calendars!

Here are embedded rehearsal and production calendar for Picasso that will be updated live. Check back often for updates!

La Belle Epoque

As we look forward in Picasso at the Lapin Agile to the 20th century, it is important that we also look back to see how the stage was set.

"La Belle Epoque" is the name given to the period in French history from the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of World War I. It was a time of great optimism, in spite of enormous social upheavals and unrest which had begun around sixty years before. France enjoyed a sense of prosperity and peace with its European neighbors there were significant new inventions and brilliant innovations in the arts.

In this “golden age” there was also a sense of anarchy and a world-wide trend against the conventional, because of a series of social and aesthetic revolutions earlier in the 19th century. These changes were only the beginning, of course, but it was a heady time.

Brief chronology of the time surrounding the events of Picasso at the Lapin Agile

1900

• Paris universal exhibition (http://www.nga.gov/resources/expo1900.shtm)
  There were several other such exhibitions earlier; they were opportunities to take stock of new inventions – in Paris 1889 the Eiffel Tower was featured; there were some also in other places in the world. This one was especially grand; it featured “Palace of Electricity,” and was the most revolutionary in terms of inventions
  
• Guide Hachette (Paris newspaper) report: In the centennial museums, divided into many sections, the Fair shows the ascent of progress step by step-from the stagecoach to the express train, the messenger to the wireless and the telephone, lithography to the X-ray, from the first studies of carbon in the bowels of the earth to the airplane…It is the exhibition of the great century, which opens a new era in the history of humanity.
• Large exhibition of the works of sculptor Auguste Rodin held in Paris

1901

• Death of Queen Victoria, the woman who had represented moral values and adherence to principles. Now that she was gone, it was permissible to enjoy oneself – the English equivalent of La Belle Époque was the Edwardian Era
• Australia declares itself a republic and inaugurates its first parliament
• Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, NY
• Astronomer Sir Richard Ball holds a conference in Milan on “possible communication between earth and mars.” Sir Richard is skeptical, but Italian Nicola Tesla says, “in a short while we shall be in communication with mars.”
• First distribution of Nobel Prizes takes place in Paris
• Guglielmo Marconi transmits a radio message from Cornwall, England to Newfoundland
• American President McKinley is assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo

1902

• Barnum and Bailey circus comes to Paris
• Trans-Siberian Railway complete

1903

• Although a luxury, already 13,000 autos in France
• Wright Brothers completed their first successful flight, Kitty Hawk, SC
• New American Negro dance, the Cakewalk, is the craze of Paris
• Curie wins the Nobel prize

1904

• Lumière Brothers invented the autochrome process for photography
• First performance of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly at Milan’s La Scala

1905

• A new group of artists, disrespectfully labeled Les Fauves (“wild beasts”) by an art critic, had their successful debut in Paris at the “Salon d’Automne”
• Composer Richard Strauss’s opera Salomé, with text by Oscar Wilde, made its scandalous debut at the New York Met
• Russian Revolution of 1905 consists of a series of strikes and anti-government violence against Tsar Nicholas II. The tsar is finally obliged to sign the “October Manifesto,” promising direct civil liberty and an elected legislative assembly.
• 24th exhibition of the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors held in Paris
• After six years of research, six doctors in Massachusetts have arrived at the conclusion that the human soul weighs about an ounce. Experiments have shown that when dying patients are laid on a balance, their weight, after they have drawn their last breath, is one ounce less than before. An observer reports, “At last the soul is being studied by scientific principles and experimental methods.”

Dreyfus Affair
Special mention should be made of the Dreyfus Affair, as it was a political scandal which dominated France during the 1890s and early 1900s, dividing the country between nationalists and the upholders of the truth (the left). It involved the wrongful conviction for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, for treason. Dreyfus was the highest ranking Jewish artillery officer in the French army. Based on some documents found in a waste-paper basket, he was charged with passing military secrets to the Germany Embassy in Paris. In 1894 he was convicted and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guiana. By the time it was realized that they had little evidence, it was politically impossible to withdraw the charges. Dreyfus’s cause was taken up by many, including the writer Emile Zola. Dreyfus was finally exonerated in 1906, readmitted into the army and even made a knight in the Legion of Honor. Unfortunately, the factions created by the affair remained in place for decades afterwards and had a number of political repercussions, including the 1905 legislation separating church and state which Pope Pius X vilified (see above).

Art Nouveau (http://www.nga.gov/feature/nouveau/exhibit_intro.shtm)
For political and social reasons, Paris was the scene of great turmoil during the several years before 1900. In many ways, the century had ended badly and there was a desire to change the atmosphere and create a new beginning as a response to the industrial urban environment. One innovation was a new decorative style which grew out natural forms, but in a stylized manner and the remaining interest in Japanese. Picasso and others in his circle were certainly aware of this phenomenon and, to a certain extent, their work was a reaction against it.

The Significance of Cubism

At that around which this play is set, there were many developing revolutionary ideas about art, combining instinct and intellect with sensation.

The breaking away began quite noticeably in the mid to late 19th century with artists like Courbet, Manet, all the Impressionists, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne. If these artist had not begun to question the traditional principles of painting, the Fauves (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/fauvism.html) and the Cubists could never have expressed themselves with so much liberty. The climate was right for new ideas, on a continuum to abstraction of all kinds.

Some significant factors leading up to new ways of looking at art and painting especially:
1. Photography – probably the most significant
1839 Daguerre’s invention
1888 Eastman began to mass market the Kodak camera
2. Impressionism (http://www.impressionism.org/)
3. Revolutions in Europe, significant ones in 1848, same year as the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels
4. Technological inventions (collapsible paint tube 1841)
5. General changes in modern life and scientific principles

In Cubism, there are said to be three stages of development (some variation in this)
1. Facet Cubism – artist began to separate objects of figures into definite geometrical elements while placing them in a composition
2. Analytical cubism – objects increasingly broken down, presentation of several aspects of the object at once
3. Synthetic cubism – further liberated from traditional reality and appearance
In first phase there was a strong influence from African sculpture, as well as painters Cezanne and Seurat.

The phenomenon eventually led to collage, for Braque and Picasso, by 1912. They began to glue paper and cloth on to the pictures – this mixture of material blurs the boundaries between the real and the painted.

Cubism was the point of departure for many artists for a long time, despite first negative reception and has been called the first and the most influential of all movements in 20th century art.

Cezanne and influence
Since 15th century, artists had begun using rules of perspective, with detail and accuracy, depicting everything as right size and shape in relation to other objects. Everything in the painting was seen from a single viewpoint. French artist Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/) was beginning to change that approach, partly to construct a representation of how we really see the world and partly to create new ways of representing space. His works illustration a combination of simultaneous viewpoints and begin to show an abstract treatment of volume and space

A retrospective exhibition was held in 1907 after his death, which was attended by many artists, including Braque and Picasso. They were inspired to continue the experiment with perspective. They produced a kind of “anti-perspective,” by trying to give up the illusion of space all together. These combine pieces simultaneous seen from different angles and different times. The broken shapes and surfaces highlight the contradictions involved in trying to paint three-dimensional objects on a flat surface.

Georges Braque (1882-1962) (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/braque_georges.html)
There was an intense collaboration between Braque and Picasso for a number of years. Braque’s 1908 “Maisons á L’Estaque” (at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland) was the work to be described by an art critic as “nothing but a pile of little cubes.” As is often the case, that was the origin of the name of the movement.

Political aspect
By 1912, the French Chamber of Deputies had a heated debate about the inclusion of several cubist painting, including those by foreign artists, at their “Salon d’automne.” These works were being called “jokes in very bad taste,” “anti-artistic,” and “anti-national.” In spite of the Fine Arts Minister’s claim not to interfere in artistic matters, the debate continued, some pressure was applied, and some works were removed. After the newspapers took it up, it became a “cause,” and one result was that cubism is frequently associated with political subversion.

In discussing the development of Cubism, French artist Fernand Leger (1881-1955) said: “All that could be done with color had already been done – what remained for us was line”

Early cubists changed the technique of painting through the use of new materials and scientific principles, in particular the relativity of time-space, which introduced the idea of movement – in order to arrive at a more complete knowledge of an object.

It has been said that modern life demanded a change in pictorial expression. And this connection between art and science is key to Martin’s play.

Bio of Steve Martin

Most of the world knows Steve Martin for his work as a comedian and actor, which continues to flourish, but it can be said that Martin’s first career was as a writer. He began to write as a student and his first break was with the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour when he was fresh from the college experience. Since then, his writing has included pieces for television and the movies as well as magazine essays, novellas and stage plays. Picasso at the Lapin Agile, was Martin’s first play, originally produced in 1996 at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. He says that his inspiration came from an afternoon he spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, looking at Picasso’s 1904-05 painting “Au Lapin Agile.” (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pica/ho_1992.391.htm)

It is said that this work was done in partial payment for Picasso’s bar bill, a common practice among the artists who patronized the Parisian café.

The play brings us a crew of turn-of-the-century types, with their shrewd and silly banter, poised and ready for the amazing times to come. But the focus of events is an imagined meeting between Picasso and Einstein, who, along with a mystery visitor, embody the spirit of the new century. The artist and the scientist deliver a kind of nutty rivalry, but also discover an essential bond and confluence of ideas.

It seems that Martin is not the only one to intuit this connection. Arthur I. Miller, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, has written on Einstein and also on the creative connections between art and science. His 2001 book, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, takes up the very notions which inform Martin’s play – the important link between the Theory of Relativity and the inception of Cubism. Miller writes: “In the intellectual atmosphere of 1905 it is not surprising that Einstein and Picasso began exploring new notions of space and time almost coincidentally. The main lesson of Einstein’s 1905 relativity theory is that in thinking about these subjects, we cannot trust our senses. Picasso and Einstein believed that art and science are means for exploring worlds beyond perceptions, beyond appearances. Direct viewing deceives, as Einstein knew by 1905 in physics, and Picasso by 1907 in art. Just as relativity theory overthrew the absolute status of space and time, the cubism of Georges Braque and Picasso dethroned perspective in art.”

For more information about Steve Martin and his multi-faceted career, see www.compleatsteve.com and www.stevemartin.com

The painting that inspired the show: "Au Lapin Agile"

Au Lapin Agile is a famous Pablo Picasso painting made in the year 1904 (the year in which our play is set). The famous painting is a depiction of Au Lapin Agile where Picasso was shown as the Harlequin and Frédé playing the guitar.

The destitute outcasts featured in Picasso's Blue Period gave way, in 1905, to circus performers and harlequins in more colorful settings. At the Lapin Agile, a canvas nearly square and broadly painted, was originally conceived to decorate a bar in Montmartre, the interior of which is depicted here. Since the painting would be seen across a crowded and smoky room, Picasso's composition was of posterlike simplicity. He aligned glasses and figures—hatted and shown from full-face to profile view—along severe diagonals, ending with a seated guitarist, Frédé, the café's owner. As identifiable as the musician are the two diffident patrons at the bar, their colorful, theatrical getup accentuating their emaciated pallor. The melancholy harlequin in the red, green, and ocher diamond-patterned costume is Picasso himself. The pouting woman decked out in an orange dress, boa, choker, and gaudy hat is Germaine Pichot, a notorious femme fatale. In 1901, unrequited love for Germaine had driven Picasso's close friend Carlos Casagemas to suicide. The melodrama continued to haunt Picasso, who evoked his dead friend in several paintings at the time. Germaine subsequently married Ramon Pichot, another of Picasso's close friends.

Picasso's best known alter ego is the Harlequin, a mysterious character with classical origins who has long been associated with the god Mercury and with Alchemy and the Underworld. Harlequin's traditional capacities to become invisible and to travel to any part of the world and to take on other forms were said to have been gifts bestowed on him by Mercury. It was also said that the secrets of Alchemy were to be found concealed within the Harlequinade.

Wine was one of Harlequin's traditional accoutrements which he often used to seduce women, occasionally Picasso's Harlequin appears to do the same thing as is alluded to in his famous painting of the Lapin Agile.

The painting currently resides at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and is one of the world's most expensive paintings. Steve Martin wrote Picasso at the Lapin Agile after seeing the painting while at The Met.