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.