Modern modernity A self-conscious Picasso in Waldoboro _BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Picasso at the Lapin Agile By Steve Martin | Directed by Denis Walsh | Produced by the Waldo Theatre, in Waldoboro | through Saturday, Aug 6 | 207.832.6060

Waldoboro’s beautiful Waldo Theatre is curious in that it seems to exist in between times. Originally built as a movie theater back in 1937, in the Greek Revival style, it underwent an 1981 restoration that softened the Art Deco lines of its interior, stretching a muted, contemporary skin over its older bones. It’s a fitting house, then, for a play that gives plenty of its own pinches to the fabric of the chronos. In Picasso at the Lapin Agile, by comic-of-many-hats Steve Martin, early 20th-century Parisians intercept visions, visitors, and popular love ballads from the future.

Martin’s central conceit arranges an imaginary meeting between modernist geniuses Einstein (Benjamine Mason) and Picasso (Corey Honkonen), in 1904 Paris, when both were on the cusp of their greatest breakthroughs. The setting is the café of the title, the Lapin Agile ("the lively rabbit"), run by Symbolist would-be writer Freddy (Dylan Davey) and his neo-Romantic (or post-Romantic, as Freddy argues) wife Germaine.

Witnessing the meeting of the minds are Gaston, a newly old man (George B. Sherman); Suzanne (Hayley Mason), who seeks the man who seduced and painted her; and art dealer Sagot (Pat Jager-Mason). As the patrons drink into the evening, they discuss art, women and men, the future of the 20th century, and what they see and don’t see in the insipid sheep painting that hangs above the bar.

Rather than taking their inspiration from the past, Picasso and Einstein exult that they are receiving it directly from the future, a theme that Martin pokes in the ribs by pulling comic anachronisms out of the ether. When Gaston spontaneously bursts into the chorus of "When a Man Loves a Woman" — or when, in the play’s strangest coup, a certain musical legend-to-be steps through a portal in the café’s bathroom — it disconcerts, and renders this ahistorical meeting more of a gag than an artistic or intellectual exercise.

Since Martin already has his characters breaking through the bounds of space and time, it’s not much of a jump for them to chip away at the fourth wall, too. Early on, Freddy stalks into the audience to consult a program on the correct sequence of the actors’ entrances, and from then on we are regularly made to remember not just that we are watching a play, but that the play we are watching knows it is a play. Between that and Martin’s liberties with time, the result is a dramatic atmosphere of extreme reflexivity and self-awareness.

As if following suit, much of the acting in the Waldo’s production comes across as slightly self-conscious, as if no one feels entirely grounded in this vortex of a setting. For the most part, the characters themselves have appeal and entertaining dimensions. Benjamine Mason’s Einstein has a lanky, birdlike charm, and Haley Mason’s overblown ingénue Suzanne has some fun turns at caricatured delectability. As Picasso, Honkonen’s belligerent self-importance yields fairly convincingly to the lower tones of wooing or the loftier ones of creative declaration. Gardner-Oakes brings an unexpected acuity to Germaine when she gives Picasso an intro-to-feminism reaming, and Jager-Mason takes a cool lean into the stance of art sophisticate. Thrust together into interaction, however, the actors seem less certain, less at ease, as if bringing their characters into play with each other and Martin’s gimmicks against time and place required another whole level of consideration.

Inadvertently, you could say, the cast illustrates one of modernity’s more vexing problems — of how sure and solid a self can seem, until seen relative to another.

Set and costumes, on the other hand, are not only firmly footed in the period but also gorgeously well-appointed. Costume designer Travis Grant (who also provides some great character comedy as would-be visionary Schmendiman) befrills the women with fabulous layers of petticoats, and Sagot’s tweedy but gleaming elegance is another great feat. The Lapin Agile itself is a rich set of dark wood tones, with wrought-iron bistro tables downstage. Behind the bar are bottles, jugs, and tin pails of baguettes, and the floor is strewn with peanut shells. Its arrangement means that most action has to happen downstage in front of the bar, which sometimes stagnates the blocking, but apart from that the set is a remarkable, beautifully wrought success.

In posing Picasso and Einstein as parallel creators, the ideas that Martin assembles in the Lapin Agile are the inklings of interesting reflections on the 20th century. It’s disappointing that he’s chosen to go light on the philosophy and heavier on the gags — this is not Tom Stoppard, after all, but the guy who gave us The Jerk — but he does get some good stuff in there. When Picasso and Einstein face off and "draw," their subsequent critiques reveal that both men traffic in formulas, but that both men work by first creating a system and then seeing "if the facts fit it." In the orchestra seats of the Waldo, with its odd, age-straddling contours, that seems as good a gloss as any on a century of uncertainty, of which even the last remnants are already retro.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com