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University Theatre’s production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile opens at the Seney-Stovall Chapel (at the Lucy Cobb Institute) Oct. 6.
Picasso at the Lapin Agile was actor-comedian-playwright Steve Martin’s first piece for the stage. It won two New York City Outer Critics Circle Awards (for best play and best playwright) when it debuted there in 1995.
The play depicts a fictional night at a popular Paris bar in 1904. It is a wry comedy that brings together some of the 20th-century’s most influential and famous personages, as Martin mixes history with fiction and modern legend. The play is set a few years before the works that brought enduring fame to Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso--Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which revolutionized modern science, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the painting that ushered in the cubist movement. In Martin’s play, these two geniuses meet by accident in the bar, discussing with comic boldness their lives and works.
The conversations between Einstein, Picasso and the bar’s regular patrons range from the sublime to the everyday. However, two geniuses in one bar can’t be enough, as one of the play’s characters remarks--and the comic high point of the play occurs when a time-traveling mystery man wearing blue suede shoes appears in the bar.
University Theatre’s production of the play will be directed by Carolyn Blackinton, a faculty member in the department of drama.
Picasso at the Lapin Agile will be presented in the restored Seney-Stovall Chapel on Milledge Avenue. The show will be performed Oct. 6-9 and 13-16 at 8 p.m. and Oct. 10 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets ($12; $10 students) are available at the box office in the lobby of the Fine Arts Building, open noon-5 p.m. weekdays. During those hours, the box office can be reached at 542-2838. Tickets will also be available one hour prior to showtime at the Seney-Stovall Chapel.
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