Great minds drink alike in ‘Picasso’

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Jennifer Price of Burr Ridge, (from left), Laura Leonardo Ownby of La Grange and Joe Petrolis of Downers Grove, are in Steve Martin’s comedy “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” | Photo by Peter Bosy

Updated: October 21, 2011 9:18AM

So, Einstein meets Picasso in a bar in Paris. . .

If that sounds like the setup to a joke, that’s not surprising, since “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” was dreamed up by comedian Steve Martin.

Martin has never shied away from pure silliness in the scripts he has written as vehicles for himself (“The Jerk,” “The Man with Two Brains,” “Three Amigos,” “The Pink Panther”), but his screenwriting career has occasionally betrayed more serious inclinations. For example, he adapted Edmond Rostand’s classic romance “Cyrano de Bergerac” for his 1987 vehicle “Roxanne.”

Meeting of minds

In 1993, Martin came up with a way to mix those two approaches in successful proportions with his debut stage play, which imagined a fractious fictional meeting between the great physicist and the great painter when both are young men on the verge of major breakthroughs.

After a reading at Martin’s home in Beverly Hills, where Tom Hanks played Picasso and Chris Sarandon played Einstein, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” debuted at Steppenwolf theater, ran for eight months and has been frequently staged ever since.

The historically hypothetical comedy opens at 8 tonight in the Theatre of Western Springs, directed by Tim Gregory, founding director of Chicago’s Provision Theatre Company (and host of HGTV cable network’s “New Spaces”), featuring TWS veterans Mike Janke and Tim Feeney, both of Downers Grove.

“It’s about 75- to 25-percent in favor of comedy,” said Gregory, when asked about the relative proportion of comedy to philosophy in “Picasso.” “This is Steve Martin, after all. He touches on Picasso’s theories about art and Einstein’s theories about physics, but, wisely, he doesn’t delve into that too deeply, because the audience would be asleep in two minutes.

“It’s entertaining first and foremost, even though it deals with some heady subjects. Expect to laugh. Don’t be scared.”

Martin’s play takes place on the night of Oct. 08, 1904, with 25-year-old Albert Einstein (Feeney) stepping into the Montmartre bistro Lapin Agile (an actual artist/intellectual hangout of the era) to keep an appointment with a young lady. Instead, soft-spoken, polite, unassuming patent-office worker Einstein encounters the arrogant 23-year-old Pablo Picasso (Janke), who has already met with some success as a painter.

Not quite BFFs

Einstein is intrigued by Picasso, but Picasso does not initially return the sentiment, though each is on the verge of a great breakthrough: Einstein’s “Special Theory of Relativity” and Picasso’s early masterpiece “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Picasso’s scorn leads to conflict, then eventual recognition of common ground, with debate foreshadowing the future of the 20th century and exploring the nature of genius. With a self-proclaimed (but extremely dubious) genius inventor named Schmendiman (Kevin Slattery) also present for contrast.

“The mere fact that these two great minds are together in the same space is enough to create conflict,” said Janke, who added that it’s a lot of fun to play someone like Picasso, who has such a sizable ego and imagines the world revolves around him — “especially since, in his case, in a way, it actually did.”

“They kind of size each other up and go into competition for the attention of the room. And that’s a lot of fun to see.”