Playwright

Steve has talked about his plays and how he writes in many forums, but this article is one of the few devoted entirely to the subject.

Boston Globe
October 19, 1997, Sunday
City Edition
ARTS & FILM; Pg. N1
STEVE MARTIN'S THEORY OF PLAYWRITING; Stand-up comic knows the words, rather than a shtick or a persona, have to work in 'Picasso at the Lapin Agile'
Patti Hartigan, Globe Staff

He's just sitting at a simple table, but the silver-haired man behind the microphone is working the room. He doesn't get up; he doesn't pace or prance or stick an arrow between his ears. He doesn't even have to say much. He does it with his face, an arch of an eyebrow, a slight upward curve of the lips, a glint of mock horror in the steely gray eyes. 

Steve Martin, after all, knows how to make 'em laugh, that he does. He's here to meet with the press about his play, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," which opens this week at the Shubert Theatre. On this particular day, the comedian-screenwriter-producer (a genuine Hollywood hyphenate) is on, turning an ordinary press event into a scene of hyperkinetic hilarity. The scribes are lapping up the one-liners like cats attacking the milk bowl after a hard day of sleep.

But there is an edge behind the laughter, a sense that the smile masks an existential sigh. Martin reveals this dark side just once during the formal event, when an earnest gentleman poses a head-scratching question.  

"Mr. Martin, a compliment first . . ." 

"Before the insult?" 

"This ability that you have . . ." 

"Did you say disability?"

The man proceeds with a rambling inquiry that seems to snake around corners and creep up and down stairs before landing, limp, at Martin's feet. The actor's lips form an O as he mouths the word "What?" At first he seems befuddled, slightly annoyed, but then there is a flicker of fear, a deer-in-the-headlights glaze that is perceptible for only an instant. Martin looks around for help, and actor-comedian Paul Provenza rushes to the rescue.

"I have to consult with my client," Provenza says, taking the attention off Martin. "Senator Corleone. Senator Corleone," he continues, turning the meeting room into a courtroom, the reporters into a jury.

The tension is eased. Everyone laughs, even Steve Martin.

Stand-up comedy, he will explain, is an instinct. It comes from somewhere deep in the soul, from something he calls a "primordial memory." The art of playwriting is another thing entirely. "When I was doing stand-up, for example, I'm up there. I'm working it. You can make a line work, you know, just by your physicality. There are so many things you can do. In a play, I thought, I'm abstracted from it if I'm not actually onstage. Then the words really have to work."

The playwright, then, sheds the shtick and the guise and the persona and leaves himself bare. In "Picasso," Martin exposes some of the sadness that always lurked in the shadows of his stand-up act, revealing another facet of the poignant side he showed in "Roxanne." The play, of course, is hilarious, but it also asks questions about the nature of art, the mystery of life, the dilemma of progress, the paradox of history. It sets up a fictional meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in 1904, when they are young and hungry for wine, women, and wisdom (not exactly in that order). Both men know they are onto something that will change the course of the century: They don't know exactly what it is, but they don't want to miss it when it happens.

"You can discuss more things in a play," Martin, 52, says of his first script for the theater. "The screenplay is about moving on and getting away as fast as possible. In a play, you can sit there and discuss the inner tube if it's interesting."

The special theory of the inner tube doesn't make it into "Picasso," but the theory of relativity does. Martin came up with the idea back in the early '90s, after he spent an afternoon looking at Picasso's early (1904-05) painting "Au Lapin Agile" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Lapin Agile (which means nimble rabbit) is the Montmartre tavern where Picasso and his fellow bohemians contemplated the meaning of art and practiced the art of living at the turn the century. Martin had his own taste of the bohemian life in his early days as a comedian, doing the art thing at a Los Angeles watering hole called the Troubadour (which means troubadour) in the 1960s. When he encountered the painting, he was at a transition in his own life and career, and, like his characters, he didn't want to miss a chance to discover something new.

So he wrote. The play debuted in 1993 at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company - "We actually worked in a vacuum," he jokes, "we had to get very small" - and a version of the play was presented a year later by the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. That early version seemed unfinished, a clever romp that asked questions about a century of celebrity but left them unanswered with a cop-out of an ending. Martin added a scene before the play opened in Los Angeles and later New York. This is the version that will open at the Shubert.

In the scene, a third figure comes back from the future to form the third leg of the historical triangle. "They meet and discuss and wish and dream and hope," Martin says of the new scene, which turns a play that ended with an ellipsis into a play that ends with an exclamation point.

"One of the things I like about the play is that it is full of that contrast of being broad and silly and really wacky, but then really turns on a dime to being moving and thoughtful and very sensitive and touching," Provenza says.

Martin interrupts him. "Which is like me on a date, actually."

Again, the room explodes with laughter, but this time, Martin only smiles, cryptically. By this point, he has already made one reference to his former wife, the British actress Victoria Tennant (their seven-year marriage ended in a tumultuous divorce around the time "Picasso" was playing at ART). He's also noted that his own life is at a crossroads, that he's branched out by writing humorous essays in The New Yorker and has completed other plays, including four one-acts that debuted at New York's Public Theatre in 1995. "I don't really think about it too much," he says of this new work. "I'm not trying to forge new ground" - a pause - "well, for my life I am." Another pause. "Because I'm me, I'm only thinking about me all the time, and I figure everyone knows what I know. But it's a nice osmosis. Word sort of creeps out, and I find I have a new perception among people."

But that's enough about him. When the discussion creeps into his private life, the man behind the clown, Martin deflects attention away from himself and onto the actors he brings with him for group chats. They are Provenza, who plays Picasso, and Mark Nelson, who plays Einstein (without the shaggy white hair and the baggy sweater).

"Another complication in the casting is that we definitely wanted the two lead actors to be named after saints," Martin says, deadpan. "And that was really, really hard."

The actors help him out with cracks about actors named Bartholomew and Luke. But Nelson can't helping waxing philosophical about the philosopher he plays. "One of the wonderful things about the play is that the geniuses behave like ordinary Joes in the bar, and the ordinary Joes in the bar are potential geniuses. We all throw around ideas and spark each other," he says. "I think Steve captured something essential about Einstein's nature."

To this, Martin quips, "I'm just an ordinary guy." The hands go up in the air, palms extended; the face says "Gee, shucks"; the tone is self-mocking, but the eyes reveal something that looks almost like embarrassment.

Martin is the ordinary guy who coined the term "wild and crazy guy" in a signature skit with Dan Aykroyd on the original "Saturday Night Live." Only now does it seem ironic that he was born in Waco, Texas, where he lived for five years before his family moved to Orange County in California, not far from Disneyland. Unlike other Hollywood types who share their most intimate secrets at the slightest hint of good publicity, Martin has been notoriously private over the course of a career that began with a gig as a gag writer for "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour." He catapulted into worldwide fame as a top stand-up comedian in the '70s and '80s, then made the successful transition into serious (and silly) films, including hits like "All of Me" and "L.A. Story" and flops like "Pennies from Heaven" and "Mixed Nuts." The man who brought existential comedy to mainstream audiences actually played one of the greatest clowns ever written for the stage, portraying Vladimir to Robin Williams's Estragon in a 1988 production of "Waiting for Godot."

That production, he says, may have subconsciously contributed to his decision to turn to playwriting. Then there was that moment at the Met. "I knew I was at a crossroads in my life - and my creative life," he says quietly, after the press conference crowd has left and the laughter is just a primordial memory.

Martin is still flanked by the actors, who serve as a sort of human security blanket. But he doesn't need to be on at this particular moment. He doesn't have to be the celebrity comedian any more; he can be a playwright contemplating his work. The play, in fact, probes the very nature of celebrity that Martin tries so hard to shun. One character, a guy named Schmendiman who has invented a brittle building material made from "equal parts asbestos, kitten paws, and radium," is a legend in his own mind. "He's the guy who believes his own publicity, whereas Picasso and Einstein are just quietly, methodically working away," Martin says. "And remember, he's the only one in the play with fans."

Schmendiman is a huckster; the other two are the real thing. Later, they're joined by a visitor from the end of the century, a time traveler who adds historical perspective. This pop culture icon - whom Martin describes as "a genius for a moment" - hints at what is to come as the century unfolds: Appearance will become more important than conception; pure thought will be replaced with superficiality. The age of possibility just might end up to be the age of regret.

Martin didn't set out to write a "millennium" play. "I hope people come out with a renewed spirit for art and science," he says, pausing. "But you know, it is time to sort of look back. It's a time to remember how ugly the century was and how beautiful the century was. It's true that art has become so packaged and commercialized that we've kind of forgotten its spirit. I remember when the creative spirit was praised. Now it's just kind of accepted as show biz, you know?"

The man who has made millions laugh is suddenly somber. "Can you imagine being Einstein? He's the only one in the world who knows it, who knows about the theory of relativity." The voice lowers to a whisper. "There was no simultaneous person in, say, Denmark, coming up with it, like the sewing machine. He was the only one. What he must have thought . . ." There's something approaching wonder in Martin's voice now. "I wonder if he ever doubted."

In the play, Einstein takes a look at a Picasso drawing and says, "I never thought the 20th century would be handed to me so casually, scratched out in pencil on a piece of paper . . . I was open to receive it. Another night and I might have dismissed it with a joke or a cruel remark."

The idea resonates personally with Martin. "For me, this transition in the last three or four years has been about preparing myself for things to come, not knowing what they are. I think art works that way. It's like this play came, not knowing, but you had to be open. You had to be ready and open. It's so easy to dismiss it. We all doe I have felt these things: my lust, my greed, my hatred, my happiness."

The room is suddenly very quiet. "What he's saying is that without feeling those things, he could not have made those things. He has to know his evil side exists. He has to have felt that. He has to use people. He has to love people. He has to be nice to people. He has to be mean."

He has to shed the machismo in the barroom - or perhaps the slapstick on the podium - and open a door into the dark. "You know, I think you can only truly love something when you recognize the dark side of the thing, too," Martin says. That's a trait he recognizes in Picasso's portraits of women, and suddenly Martin decides he wants to go over to the Museum of Fine Arts, where the blockbuster exhibition "Picasso: The Early Years" is on view.

Until this moment, Martin has declined invitations to visit the museum, for a number of reasons. One is time. He has to catch a flight back to New York. Another is the curse of celebrity. He can't walk down the street or into a museum gallery, for that matter, without being hounded for requests for autographs or photographs, for some piece of himself. In the lobby at the MFA, in fact, he's approached by a trio of grinning teenagers holding out crumpled notebooks. It's hard to tell who is more self-conscious - the autographer or the askers. Up in the gallery, the same thing happens, again and again. Forget the exhibit, which is the most comprehensive collection ever amassed of Picasso's youthful work. All eyes are on Martin.

But Martin only has eyes for the Picassos, the mournful blues, the harlequins with their aching eyes. He pauses in front of a portrait, "Nude Combing Her Hair." Naked and vulnerable, she gazes down at the ground, not out at the viewer; her body is composed of thick, rough brush strokes contrasted by the softness of her long curls. Martin gazes at the painting, then whispers, "That's the painting I had in mind when I wrote the line, 'I want to see the thousand years of tenderness in a woman combing her hair.' "

The words hang there, like a lyric someone must have played in some misty barroom a long, long time ago. Martin says it again: "The thousand years of tenderness . . ." Then he shakes himself, puts on his dark glasses, and thanks a stranger for encouraging him to see the show. He doesn't seem to notice the 10-year-old girl who is tugging on her daddy's coat and pointing at him. He doesn't need to puncture the moment with a wisecrack, an arch of an eyebrow, an upward curve of the lip. He just needs to find the door out of the museum and into the future and be ready for it to open, whenever that may be.