Steve Martin’s ‘Picasso’ is HGTV Host’s TWS Debut

So Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso walk into a bar, and the bartender promptly shatters the fourth wall.

It can only be Picasso at the Lapin Agile, the first full-length play ever written by legendary comic Steve Martin, directed for the next two weeks at the by Tim Gregory, familiar to HGTV viewers as the host of the remodeling show New Spaces.

Martin’s play imagines a moment in 1904 when two men destined for genius might have stumbled across each other in an arsty Parisian café. Einstein and Picasso, both in their mid-20s, would each find respective international fame just a year or two later—but in Martin’s unique origin story, first they’d have to engage in a philosophical duel. (Cue the cry of “draw”—and each great mind quite literally races pencil to paper!)

“It is a farce, on some level, but it’s also an intellectual farce,” said Gregory, who is making his debut as a TWS guest director. “There’s some really high-end thinking that happens.”

High-end thinking from Steve Martin? Yes, indeed. The star of classics like The Jerk had actually considered becoming a philosophy professor before devoting himself to acting and stand-up comedy.

But make no mistake, Picasso has classic Martin comedy written all over it. “Reading the script, I’m able to see Steve Martin play each of the roles,” said Downers Grove resident and 12-year TWS veteran Tim Feeny, who plays Einstein. “So maybe he wrote it for himself.”

“There’s a lot of subtext to it,” said fellow Downers Grove resident Mike Janke, the production’s Picasso. “But even if you just ignored all that, it’s still a really funny and enjoyable play.”

The two historical figures are surrounded in their funny mental meanderings by a fluctuating cast of opinions and ambitions, in the form of bartenders (Joe Petrolis and Laura L. Ownby), lovestruck fangirls (Jennifer Price and Debbie Angelillo), an elderly patron (Bill Love), an art curator (Jim Hannigan), a countess (Julie Tomek), an incompetent wannabe unfortunately named Schmendiman (Kevin Slattery) and, eventually, a very special inspirational visitor (Jason McCargo).

“[Martin] is so good as a humorist and as a comedian that he can actually layer in different levels of humor and different types of humor into the same piece, and it’ll all still work,” Gregory said. “Sometimes it’s slapstick. Sometimes it’s just really clever wordplay. He’ll use all these different angles of humor to make something work, which makes it really fun to work on.

“Comedy is tough, and so the task is to make it look fun and be funny without trying to be funny. That’s what we strive for—to keep it light and tight.”

In the center of this menagerie rests the rivalry between the calculating, intellectual Einstein and the flamboyant, lecherous Picasso: both budding geniuses at the cusp of success, but seemingly with little common ground between them—or, perhaps, more common ground than they might at first acknowledge.

“They’re similar in their desire to be the best in breaking past barriers that limited human potential or human growth up until they came along,” said Feeny. “They’re at the leading edge of their fields, and they discover that they’re very similar to each other.”

That rivalry has even travelled out of the play, with Feeny and Janke sharing friendly banter backstage and giving each other grief in the dressing room.

While Feeny grew a mustache to play Einstein (actually his second time playing an Einstein, previously taking the Dr. Einstein role in Arsenic and Old Lace), Janke shaved to become Picasso. Both did at least some historical research on their characters, finding elements to bring out in their performances.

In the case of Janke—whose Picasso is quite a womanizer—that involved some rather unique method acting. “There’s a point in the play where someone [tells Picasso] that he notices every woman and thinks what it would be like to be with that woman,” Janke said. “So I would try to do that, and I found after a day or two it was exhausting! It’s quite different from my personality.”

Whatever level theatergoers choose to take the play on, director Gregory emphasized that they can “expect an afternoon when they can just sit back and have a good time.”

Picasso at the Lapin Agile runs at the Theatre of Western Springs October 20, 21, 22, 27, 28 and 29 at 8:00 p.m., October 23, 29 and 30 at 2:30 p.m. and October 23 at 7:30 p.m.; tickets can be obtained by calling the , or online through their website.