'Picasso at the Lapin Agile'
Now in previews; opening Oct. 29
Briar Street Theatre, 3133 N. Halsted
(773) 348-4000

Even when his first play -- "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" -- was in its infancy, "during only its second staged reading at a (theater) workshop in Australia," Steve Martin sensed "there was something there, rocky as it was."

That's why he immediately started to write a second play, "WASP."

"It hit me that if this thing ('Picasso') really took off, if people liked it, I could be intimidated about ever writing another play. So I figured I better get started on a new one so that wouldn't happen to me."

It obviously did the trick. Along with "WASP" -- currently running in Australia -- Martin has penned "Patter for the Floating Lady" and "The Zig-Zag Woman," all of which have been produced at the Public Theatre in New York. In addition, the multifaceted entertainer is in the early stages of writing a fifth play that he expects to be ready for the stage in a couple of years.

However, it's Martin's first effort at playwriting -- which had its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre's Studio in fall, 1993 -- that has been his most successful, rating critical raves for productions in New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco.

Now "Picasso" is coming back to Chicago, "where it all so happily -- so sublimely -- first happened," says Martin. The play, again directed by original director Randall Arney, is currently showing in previews and officially opens to the public Oct. 29 at the Briar Street Theatre.

A London production is planned for next year, and a film version also is in the works.

"We have a screenplay, but the film version is still a ways off," Martin says. "I feel 'Picasso' still has a theatrical life of its own to run, before we go and put it up on the screen."

When that happens, will he cast himself in the movie? "Perhaps. I might do a cameo role. Of course, I'm not the right age for any of the parts. . . . I'm too young," he says with a sly chuckle.

"Picasso at the Lapin Agile" in fact has characters of all ages sprinkled through its creative story line, a fantasy born more from Martin's own life than from history, despite its 1904 setting.

"There were various stages of congealing that all came together that allowed me to cook up this play. First of all, I have always loved Picasso and happened to be reading a book about him at the time I began writing.

"Second, a bunch of us kind of grew up in a bar in L.A. when we were starting out. It was called the Troubadour. I hung out there . . . the Eagles hung out there. A lot of people were hanging around there during our, well, pre-stage of our careers."

Sort of like the pre-''Tonight Show" appearance stage?

"Yes," Martin says with a laugh. "That's a good way to describe it.

"And third, I had just seen the painting 'The Lapin Agile' at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It costs $ 40 million now. But once it used to hang unstretched and unframed on the wall at the (real) Lapin Agile bar in Paris.

"I knew I wanted to write about the Lapin Agile (bar). I knew what the tone was going to be -- surreal, funny, but a little serious. . . . I just started typing, and all of sudden Elvis and Einstein just sort of came in.

"It was sort of weird," says Martin, sounding just like his George Banks character in the two "Father of the Bride" films.

The final version of "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" tells the story of a fictional 1904 meeting in the Lapin Agile bar between three men who went on to have a tremendous impact on the 20th century -- Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein and a strange visitor from the future: Elvis Presley.

In 1904, the 23-year-old Picasso is three years away from painting his reputation-launching "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Albert Einstein is 25 and a year shy of publishing his Special Theory of Relativity. The play centers on the chance meeting of the two men in the Lapin Agile,

where they begin a conversation that evolves into a humorous but thought-provoking examination of where they think mankind will wander in the 20th century. Elvis arrives as a visitor from the future to help round out the formula.

The pace of the action is furthered by supporting characters such as an art dealer, the bar owner, his girlfriend, a sex- and art-loving older man, one of Picasso's former flings and Charles Dabernow Schmendiman, an inventor and genius, forgotten by history.

Though his play centers on at least two true geniuses, Martin stresses that wasn't his principal focus while writing it.

"I don't think of them as geniuses. I think of them as people. I feel one part of me views genius as a kind of accident.

"There's a line in the play where I have Picasso say, 'Every once in a while there is a Picasso, and I happen to be him.' I just happen to think geniuses are people like us -- except their brains are firing on all pistons."

Martin also sees longevity as a contributing factor. "Picasso had a very long life . . . time to create much and leave a tremendous body of work. . . . Others, like Modigliani or Gorky, died relatively young. . . . So that's something to consider. Imagine what they could have done if they

had lived as long as Picasso.

"Of course when it came to Einstein, he had an idea so big, he only needed one!"

Martin has been a writer for his entire career, creating his own stand-up material and also writing or co-writing the screenplays for "Roxanne," "L.A. Story," "A Simple Twist of Fate," "The Jerk," "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid," "The Man With Two Brains" and "Three Amigos!" But he considers playwrighting to be "something totally different."

He loves the intimacy of the experience. "It's great. Unlike a film, a play is written to be experienced in a theater where you only have to please -- or not please -- 200 people.

"Without a doubt you spill your guts out there. But it's not so much a 'production' as it is you the writer expressing your voice directly to an audience, and no one can change that without your approval. I like that. I like that very much."

That isn't to say Steve Martin is giving up acting in the comic films for which he's so well known. "That's a part of my life -- even though I'm lying a bit low these days -- as is writing plays now."

But being funny is only part of all that. In his mind the success of his better films -- his list includes "The Jerk," "Parenthood," "Roxanne," "Father of the Bride," "L.A. Story," "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" -- "isn't that they were just funny. Sure, you have to make it funny first. But deep down they all have that romantic thing in them. That's what makes them work.

"Currently I'm filming 'The Spanish Prisoner.' David Mamet wrote it, and he's directing it. I love him and like (the project) a lot.

"I get to play a bad guy. And you know what? You play the bad guy essentially the same way you play a funny, good guy. What's fun is the audience knows you're bad, which makes your nice, surface persona just all the more heinous."

CULTURES ARE AS PSYCHOLOGICALLY recalcitrant as individuals; generation after generation (instead of year after year) they display the same traits; adapted, reshaded, newly proportioned, but indelible and intransigent.

I say this because whenever I see an American comic at work on stage or screen I am astonished (that verb covers emotions from despair to enchantment) at how accurate Constance Rourke's book "American Humor" is. It was published in 1931, and it tracked our comic traditions through three centuries, from frontier shenanigans to urban modernism. She called it a study of the national character and saw us as compulsive, combustible performers and monologuists, always dramatizing and mythologizing ourselves; always perfecting our personas (getting the walk, the talk, getting the look, the one-liner down pat); turning characters (our own or other people's) into types and types into legends; turning conflicts into wisecracks and traumas into farcical tall tales.

What sent me back to the book were Steve Martin's two Off Broadway productions and Dick Gregory's one-man show, plus the usual late-night talk shows, Woody Allen's latest movie, "Mighty Aphrodite," and the fact that last Sunday, both The New York Times hardcover and paperback best-seller lists were topped by the book-length musings of comic performers and monologuists.

Constance Rourke also said that American comedy is bound up with fantasies of youthful conquest and power. Our comics are verbal sharpshooters, slapstick pranksters, cheerful con artists and masters of looks that know where to aim and how to kill.

Steve Martin's comic persona has always depended on shrewd boyish goofiness. He combines deadpan irony about show business -- nobody sends up old genres, old gags, or the self-regarding fatuities of performers more effectively or affectionately -- with pure slapstick pleasure at all the pranks his body and voice can play. There is also a streak of melancholy (see "Roxanne" and "Grand Canyon") that can turn into true emotion or just into whimsical "look at sensitive me" attitudes.

"Roxanne" showed that Mr. Martin could write a real screenplay; "WASP and Other Plays," which recently opened at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, and "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," now in its third month at the Promenade, show that he can devise attractive little theater pieces. And I say devise not to patronize but because both, especially "WASP," depend at least as much on magic tricks, sight gags and quirky situations as on language and story.

"WASP" is tucked onto a small stage that makes us feel we've come upon a small-town carnival. (Cheers for that blue -- periwinkle blue -- curtain covered with moons and stars; cheers for the witty and just fanciful enough scenic, lighting, costume and sound design of Thomas Lynch, Donald Holder, Laura Cunningham and Red Ramona.)

Actually, "WASP" consists of a curtain-raiser, two sketches and a one-act play. Except for the opener, "Guillotine," which is too short and too literal to go anywhere, Mr. Martin always starts with a physical-visual gag or puzzle that segues into a mental and emotional one.

"Maybe now he'll notice me," says the perky young thing in "The Zig-Zag Woman," her body encased in a collection of boxes (remember that old magic trick?) that separate her head from her legs and turn her torso into a missing part. The sleight-of-hand trickery that disassembles body parts and makes heads spin backward has an emotional equivalent in the discombobulating perceptions and expectations of romance.

In "Patter for the Floating Lady," a modest-looking magician (played by Don McManus), who looks more like a lawyer or accountant, tells us that having seen a fakir in India levitate a woman in a village, he now plans to levitate his girlfriend, Angie. You have to understand, he explains with the seemingly mousy but quite cunning obsessiveness we have come to call Thurberesque, "that when I see Angie, I experience a bright yellow flash of desire. And I thought if I could give her this, if I could suspend her in space, this would be my exchange for the nights I laid on top of her, she experiencing nothing. . . . Tonight I want to levitate her, not for me, but for her. I would like her to know how it feels to have no attachments, yet her freedom is mine."

Once she is levitated, Angie wins the balance of verbal and emotional power, and it is pleasing to watch an actress (Amelia Campbell) deliver lines about freedom and confinement while sitting cross-legged in the air. The lines themselves are less satisfying; when Mr. Martin gets serious he lists toward the declamatory lushness that we have come to call soap opera, embossed with touches of magical realist poetry. (Remember that whimsy I said he could spread a little thick? This is its literary equivalent.)

Writers tend to strain for effects when they are first learning a form, or when they are switching from one they have mastered to one they are just getting acquainted with. And Mr. Martin is so used to counting on his own craft that he is still testing which effects -- exchanges, laugh lines, gags, soliloquies -- stand on their own and which ones, to work really well, need him. I'm glad to report that this is not a sex-specific problem: his women get daft, deft lines and his men get lugubrious musings. It's more a matter of learning to express what is intimate and serious as cleanly as he expresses what is eccentric and funny.

Everything is cleaner and more unified in "Picasso," that fantasy about the marriage of true minds -- Pablo Picasso's and Albert Einstein's -- made in the heaven of a Paris cafe in 1904. Mr. Martin has always had a sweet schoolboy's love of greatness, or at least of mastery: why else remake "Cyrano de Bergerac" or have the detective in "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" get assistance from Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis? "Picasso" is an open-hearted valentine to pure art and pure science; to new ways of seeing and thinking set in motion by two of the biggest stars this century ever produced. Mr. Martin makes us feel the pleasure and the fun these two young geniuses must have had. He has penned a benign high-culture version of "A Star Is Born" with a happy ending.

Of course, "Picasso" and "WASP" are getting more attention because they are by Steve Martin than they would if they were by a promising young playwright whose name we were hearing for the first time. So I'm glad that he's promising. And I'm twice glad that he let the plays be the thing, that he's writing roles for other resourceful young actors and not insisting that they revolve around his own comic persona. For all the pleasure she took in American humor, Constance Rourke also pointed out that a nation of stand-up comics is a nation of triumph-seeking egoists.

You certainly can't help noticing this if you go to see Woody Allen in "Mighty Aphrodite." Mr. Allen still writes for himself, directs himself and stars himself, and he just doesn't seem to care whether a line or gag is on the money or not (some are, plenty aren't), so long as he delivers it, gets away with it and has the last word. It's very wearing. As one of the women in Mr. Martin's "Picasso" remarks when she sits in front of her mirror to "see what all the fuss is about": "A mirror is like a mind; if you don't use it, it loses the power to reflect." And she's right, but only if you're paying as much attention to what you don't want to see as what you do.

There is another driving characteristic of American Humor: its continuing obsession with ethnic and racial comedy. Constance Rourke talked about this a lot too -- about how it began with Yankees and Indians, then devoured and regurgitated every group that found its way here from every corner of the globe (with the exception of Antarctica, the only continent on which no ethnic conflict is reported to have occurred this past year).

Who finds what funny about whose group, and where, why or when? When does a real thigh-slapper become a pathetic or infuriating cliche, and by what consensus? Who will leave a theater comfortably reassured and who will leave embarrassed or irate? Are you and your kind the spectacle, or are you the happy, unscathed spectators?

I had no choice but to wonder about these things as I watched the title play of Mr. Martin's "WASP" quartet, a sometimes broad (we're talking "Saturday Night Live" broad) and sometimes genuinely mournful depiction of an archetypal -- or is it stereotypical? -- middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family. They are smug and conventional socially, repressed and tormented psychologically, and they like to turn the work ethic into a weapon for blunting or bashing independence. You've seen it in Robert Redford's "Ordinary People" and in Woody Allen's visit to Diane Keaton's family in "Manhattan"; you've seen it in Martin Mull's comedy routines too.

So what? Art, like life, can use repeats and formulas to good effect. Nicky Silver's "Food Chain," at the Westside Theater, plays with all kinds of WASP, Jewish, gay and fat-people conventions: it is funny, fresh and cutting because it keeps the combinations moving and lets self-awareness compete with compulsive repetition.

"WASP" isn't nearly so resourceful, but it isn't cynically or naively stale either. And it had its moments: as when dad leaves the house to play golf and miserable mom and the two attention-starved teen-agers celebrate by turning themselves into a cozy little British family straight out of the kind of Anglophile-American fantasy that extends from A. A. Milne and Mary Poppins to weekly fixes of "Masterpiece Theater." Or when the son asks if he can be excused from the dinner table and the father says "finish your meal," then turns to us and says, "If I can't be excused, why should he?" The secret signal that one generation passes on to the next is at least as likely to be "I want you to suffer the way I did" as "I want things to be better for you."

I was the spectator, though, not the spectacle and I suspect this made me more tolerant -- and possibly less attentive. The targets of ethnic comedy cry "stereotype!" faster than the rest of us and not only because they're touchy; they do tend to know the material best.

When I saw the one-man show "Dick Gregory Live" last month at the Samuel Beckett Theater (it closes there on Jan. 21 and reopens two days later at the Forty-Seventh Street Theater), I found myself in the unusual position of being both spectator and spectacle, and in the unhappy position of not enjoying either.

What has happened to the sleek, severe, mocking performer who used racist beliefs, racial ignorance and racial naivete in a crucial period of American history -- the civil rights movement of the 1960's -- to produce trenchant, one-man cultural satires?

Today, Mr. Gregory talks vaguely but loftily about "cultural patterns" and uses that phrase to wheel out old, mostly tired jokes about what happens when whites try to cook chitlins for black friends, or about the differences between how blacks and whites treat their dogs. (Try and guess which group lets their dogs eat from the dinner plates of appalled guests -- go ahead!) Mr. Gregory also tells a series of not awfully fresh jokes about motherhood and the mother-child bond versus what he depicts as the nearly superfluous state of fatherhood.

I have always believed in the vast resources of folk humor, both racial and sexual, but believe me, the wittiest of the Folk left most of these jokes behind years ago.

When Mr. Gregory ventured onto touchier, more interesting territory -- O. J. Simpson, for instance, or Colin Ferguson, or Bill Clinton's pep talk to the American troops he was about to send to Bosnia -- his comments dissipated into lightweight talk-show host mockery, the all-purpose kind that frees the comic from having to express any opinion whatsoever; he just thinks everybody's behaving pretty absurdly.

WASP and Other Plays By Steve Martin Joseph Papp Public Theater 425 Lafayette Street 260-2400

The truth about all murder mysteries, as we know, is that the author did it. The violence would never have occurred if he or she hadn't written that it did, and the guilty party would never have been caught or gotten away if there hadn't been a final chapter. Authors are guilty souls and that's all there is to it. In the theater, they've been that way ever since Pirandello experienced the seizure of guilt that led him to write Six Characters. His sin was one of omission: The six characters are searching for someone to tell the story Pirandello couldn't bring himself to finish. Or rather, two of them are. Of the other four, two are too young to speak, one refuses to participate, and the fourth, the mother, does her best to keep the story from being told at all.

Nine decades later, at the butt-end of our Pirandellian century, Athol Fugard finds--or has put--himself in a situation almost symmetrically opposite to Pirandello's. He would like the characters of Valley Song not to finish their play--so much so that he allows himself--as a character called ''The Author''--to play a demeaning, interfering role in the action. He even underscores his inability to halt events by double-casting himself: A very pinkish-white, very Boer Fugard appears as The Author, and the same Fugard, with no change of color or ethnicity, and only a miniscule shift of accent, as Abraam Jonkers, an elderly ''coloured,'' or mixed-race, farmer, the grandfather of Veronica, played by the distinctly nonwhite--and distinctively beautiful--Lisa Gay Hamilton.

Abraam, too, would like to stop the action. The scene is a fertile valley in the Karoo, the vast, mountain-streaked South African desert where many of Fugard's plays are set. In a village slowly turning to a ghost town as the white population dies off or leaves for the cities, Abraam farms his tiny plot, on deserted grounds by an abandoned house, just as he did when he served the house's owner. His wife is dead; his daughter, who ran off to the city with a local delinquent, died giving birth to Veronica. His granddaughter and his garden patch are Abraam's whole life; Veronica, who has a beautiful singing voice, is ripening into a lovely young woman. The inevitable end of the story, common to every rural area full of pious, hardworking farmers, is visible early on.

What reverses the usual pattern is Fugard's other role, as Author. The inevitable scenes are all laid out in Abraam's relationship to Veronica; if you had Fugard's command of the dialect, you could probably write them yourself: how Veronica sneaks out of the shack at night to watch tv through the window of a white woman's house; how Abraam finds her secret correspondence with a friend who's moved to Johannesburg; how she shows him the money she's earned singing for pennies in the marketplace and he throws it at her, shouting, ''Devil's money!'' If not for the descriptions of the Karoo, and the gentle African lilt of DiDi Kriel's music, it might all seem like something carried over from the late show--Lewis Stone and Leila Hyams, wasn't it, or maybe J. Carroll Naish and Betty Field?

But the Author mucks up the symmetry of the old schema, in which the usual third character is the city slicker who lures the country girl away from home with false promises of fame and fortune and champagne suppers. Fugard's Author, in contrast, is the city's other face, conservative, cautious, nostalgic for the small-town life much of his writing has celebrated. He buys the abandoned homestead where Abraam sharecrops, not to throw the old man off the land but to keep him on it; to him Veronica's song is an adjunct of the land, which he would prefer to keep on it as well. He plays devil's advocate with her, warning about the crowded, competitive, destructive nature of city life, more like an itinerant preacher than a sophisticated visiting artist.

Naturally, the ploy doesn't work. Talent must out; an obscure pumpkin patch in the country is no place for a girl with beauty and a gift for song. The Author's desire, though more knowing than Abraam's, is at heart no less untenable. It's Veronica herself who understands what she has to do; her last song is a farewell to the valley, looking forward to the pleasure of recalling it in song from elsewhere. Young, black, and knowing her rights, Veronica is the new South Africa; her grandfather and the Author are mired in their memories of the old.

Except that, of course, Fugard is also the author of Veronica--songs, ambitions, dreams, backtalk, and all--as well as the director who shaped Hamilton's performance of her, a piece of enchantment that would be like time-lapse photography of a rose blossoming, if roses could only sing, laugh, and weep with Hamilton's burning conviction. She's the reality that bursts through both his elaborately self-conscious structure and the rather stereotyped story embedded in it. (His language, too, often touches familiar bases; Hamilton's freshness sweeps her past that obstacle as well.) The lingering point of dramatic interest, though, is the double effectiveness of Fugard's device, which serves neatly both to liven up his cliched story and to embody his own sense of guilt for wishing South Africa's bad old days weren't quite gone yet.

Fugard's plays have often functioned as allegories, which sometimes broadened the scope of their naturalistic stories, and at others made them seem rigid and confined, particularly when what they allegorized was South Africa's political condition, and that condition itself seemed immobilized. In a sense, he may feel himself to be simultaneously the least guilty and the guiltiest of all South African whites: least so, because he's devoted his artistic life to making apartheid a locus of world indignation, providing a voice for those whom the apartheid government would not otherwise let speak; guiltiest, because apartheid has made Fugard's career. South Africa's shame was his opportunity; although he never used the opportunity shamefully, as a practical man of the theater, he did not fail to profit by it. Naturally, he misses it now that it's gone; just as naturally, since he has never been less than honest, he indicts himself for doing so. What his writing might be like if he disentangled himself from his country's history remains anyone's guess. All of South Africa is free now, one might say, except Athol Fugard.

What Steve Martin wishes to devote his playwriting career to is also anyone's guess. Does he in fact really want one? His four one-acts at the Public Theater, which range from a weak blackout sketch to a long, meander through the Middle American mind, don't offer much of an answer. Magic tricks and a kind of whiz-bang showoffiness are his basic materials, but tempered with a kind of soigne Absurdism, so that there's no joy in them, as if the carny flash were there to conceal his embarrassment at having the much drier sensibility that hides underneath. As a result, it's alternately hard to guess what Martin's driving at, or hard to care about it.

Guillotine, the first piece, is an overelaborate joke, the point of which is that it's not a joke. The Zig-Zag Woman, marginally more amusing, is a joke that is a joke, but that's about all. Patter for the Floating Lady, which comes closest of the first half's three short sketches to attempting something more, is defeated by its own abashed wordiness; it spends so much time telling you it doesn't matter that you lose interest.

WASP, which takes up the entire second act, is one more explosion of the nuclear family, in a variety of random directions. It has a few funny bits, some authorial and some actor-induced, and many more bits that are pointless, pallidly amusing, too old to get laughs, or so interesting that they might have been worth weaving into a sustained work. But unlike Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which has real merit and real brains behind its jocoseness, WASP would never have been produced as is if it were by an unknown novice instead of a movie star.

NEW YORK An imaginative sense of cartoon looniness links the quartet of four puzzling short plays written by comedian Steve Martin which opened Sunday at off-Broadway's Public Theater.

Yet that delicious daffy quality is not enough to sustain the whole evening, which grows progressively more dim as the playlets proceed.

''Guillotine,'' the best and the briefest piece, opens the program. It's little more than a vaudeville sketch in which a man buys a head-severing machine for what he calls ''self-protection.'' Yet it is low-comedy fun.

The device is installed in the man's home, and he warns the maid not to dust it. Of course, she does. The fun comes from watching her tempt fate and the blade. Carol Kane is all wide-eyed wonder as the eager maid determined to dust even the pet goldfish.

Things get more arty and less humorous with ''The Zig-Zag Woman,'' a tale of unrequited love. A plain Jane waitress turns into a magician's assistant whose body is sliced into three parts by steel plates and then moved into different square boxes. When she does transform into a zig-zag woman, she gets noticed by her true love.

''Patter for the Floating Lady'' concludes the first act. It is the darkest and most pretentious of the plays and concerns a magician who tries to levitate his girl friend. She actively dislikes him. Their sour affair doesn't affect the magic trick. Don McManus and Amelia Campbell struggle valiantly with the murky dialogue.

''WASP,'' the evening's longest play, pokes fun with a surface hipness at a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family. The targets are obvious, and Martin's insights are not particularly deep. Too many golf jokes and a desperate if predictable sadness to the wife.

The people are caricatures, more grotesque than giggle-producing, so it is hard to work up any sympathy for them.

Director Barry Edelstein has given a jazzy, fast-paced feel to the production. Yet it all rings fairly hollow despite the good intentions of the cast and the slickness of the proceedings.

'With a play I don't have to be afraid I just blew $ 25 million of someone else's money,' comic-turned-playwright Steve Martin confided to Newsweek in its latest issue.

'When I write a screenplay, the premise is get in, get out and don't stop to say anything. But a play is anything you can get away with.'

Martin's second play, 'Picasso at the Lapin Agile,' now at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, brings together a young Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in a seedy bar. Martin's one-actor play, 'Wasp,' was part of the recent Festival of New One Act Plays at the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York.

Of his method as a playwright, he said, 'I just kept typing and never stopped,' adding almost apologetically 'It came so easily, I'm afraid.'

Martin said he will continue to write because it lets him express his 'anarchic side.'

THEATER REVIEW WASP AND OTHER PLAYS: An off-Broadway bill of four one-act plays, presented by the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St. Written by Steve Martin. With Don McManus, Carol Kane, and Amelia Campbell. Directed by Barry Edelstein. $ 30. (212) 260-2400.

In "Guillotine," the first of four one-act plays by comedian Steve Martin being presented by the New York Shakespeare Festival, a man buys a guillotine. He ships it home. As a maid dusts it, carelessly putting her head beneath the blade, the expected happens.

That's it. Five minutes. The audience at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, where the one-act quartet opened Sunday, was a trifle bewildered but applauded politely. Little did it know that the throwaway sketch would be the high point of the evening.

In the delightful "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," which opened earlier this year at the Promenade Theater, Martin showed a gift for transferring his unique comic notions from films to the stage. That play is fast-moving, witty, and charming.

These one-acters, on the other hand, are muddled, self-involved, and more grim than funny.

"The Zig-Zag Woman" and "Patter for the Floating Lady" center on magic tricks, with Martin trying to link the illusions with the relationships between men and women. It's an odd thought, presented so fuzzily that it leaves you scratching your head.

"Patter" is also obsessed with the idea that, no matter how close we get to another person, there is always an impenetrable emotional core. This common-sense insight is presented at exhausting length.

The idea of human isolation is also central to "Wasp," which takes up the second half of the evening.

In this sour comedy, Martin brings us the ever-familiar "perfect" family of the Fifties, with an outwardly serene Mom, Dad, Sis, and Brother.

Since we've been down this road before, it's hardly a surprise to discover that beneath the "Father Knows Best" facade, there's a lonely, frustrated mother, disappointed kids, and a distant father who doesn't know the meaning of the word intimacy.

Martin supplies jokes, but, like the rest of the evening, this black comedy isn't very funny. The author seems to be working out some highly personal concerns, and hasn't found an entertaining way to share them.

"Wasp" is weighed down by speechifying, in woolly language that may read decently, although I doubt it, but doesn't "play." The ear can't put the elusive sentences together into meaningful paragraphs.

The director, Barry Edelstein, manages to create a continuous, cartoonish style for the bill, and the actors, especially Don McManus, Amelia Campbell, Carol Kane, and Kevin Isola, are solid. But the plays just don't get anywhere.

In "The Zigzag Woman," a genial barfly remembers the wife who left him 21 years earlier. She was a termagant, but the man continues to hope that she will suddenly appear one day, full of repentance, to sit beside him in a bar or a theater or maybe even a laundromat. He always keeps a seat ready for her.

"She issued a declaration of independence every time she entered the room," he remembers with pride. "Her hair was practically edible."

Anyone who can write lines of such comic rue is worth attending to, as is Steve Martin, the playwright, who's back without ever having been away. Even as his "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" continues its hit run at the Promenade Theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he is responsible for the program of four short plays, including "The Zigzag Woman," that opened last night in the Martinson Theater of the Joseph Papp Public Theater.

With his new film, "Father of the Bride, Part II," playing at other strategic locations around the city, Mr. Martin has us surrounded, but there are worse positions to be in.

Because there's no official umbrella title for the program at the Public, it can be most accurately identified as " 'WASP' and Other Plays." "WASP," the longest of the four plays, occupies the second half of the evening. It's also the most problematic for the audience, as it apparently was when it was first performed here in the spring of 1994 in the Ensemble Studio Theater's annual one-act-play series.

Though Mr. Martin is still getting his act together as a playwright, he couldn't ask for better treatment than he is receiving both at the Promenade and at the Public. " 'WASP' and Other Plays" is of such insubstantial mistiness that it virtually evaporates as you watch. Yet Barry Edelstein, the director, and the cast of excellent, firmly rooted comic actors go a very long way to give the program a reason for being.

Consider, for example, the sight of Carol Kane as she dusts the title prop in "Guillotine," the deft and lunatic blackout sketch that opens the program. Dressed as a French maid, she moves around a suburban living room, feather duster in hand, obsessively attacking each piece of furniture -- television set, Barcalounger, etc. -- saving until last the guillotine, the family's most prized possession, its blade at the ready. In her zeal to relocate dust, especially dust lodged in hard-to-reach places, will she or won't she put her head on the block?

There's no message here. "Guillotine" is a delicious vaudeville piece, performed by Ms. Kane with a sense of intense, bourgeois propriety that is as alarming as it is priceless. Though it's very short, not running a minute longer than it should, it sets the casually surreal tone for the plays that follow.

The title role in "The Zigzag Woman" is played by Amelia Campbell, who is desperately trying to attract the attention of a young man she has fallen in love with. To this end, she has herself wheeled into a bar in one of those magician's boxes in which a body seems to be in pieces, the head at some distance from the torso, the torso at some remove from the hands. The bar's two customers see nothing strange in the ploy. One fellow remembers that he attracted the attention of the woman he married by having himself put into a bottle, like a model ship.

The young woman's trick is successful. Her young man, played by Kevin Isola, has always dreamed of a zigzag woman, but the play's ending is muted. Its melancholy theme, which is also evident in the two plays that follow, is expressed by the older man in "The Zigzag Woman": "Love is a promise delivered already broken."

As he has shown in his best movies, Mr. Martin is less persuasive as a philosopher than as a limpidly zany idea man and actor. In "Patter for the Floating Lady," which closes the evening's first half, a magician (Don McManus) tries to rekindle a love affair with his assistant (Ms. Campbell) by levitating her. His idea is that as she rises, she will realize that her new freedom is totally dependent on him. Somewhat testily from midair, she points out that love doesn't mean having complete domination over the person loved.

The writing becomes increasingly muddled as this play proceeds, but the stagecraft is so slick and funny that it helps to soothe the objections as they arise. "Patter for the Floating Lady" works principally as a magic show. For much of the piece, Ms. Campbell, in the lotus position, appears to hover over the stage as she attempts to talk sense into the boorish, lovesick magician. How it's done, I've no idea, and only a small part of me wants to know. The image is funny in itself.

"WASP" is something else. It's a surprisingly clumsy, waywardly surreal sendup of white Anglo-Saxon American Protestants, the kind who were celebrated in 1950's sitcoms that are now funnier than most sendups. Mr. Martin's prototypical WASP family is dominated by a creationist dad who says that heaven is 17 miles above the earth. He also cheats on his wife, plays golf and loves to make a buck. These WASP's would be unrecognizable to John Cheever, A. R. Gurney or Sam Shepard, for good reason. They are caricatures of cartoons. The playwright's focus is too broad and too fuzzy.

The play is well acted by Mr. McManus as Dad, Ms. Kane as Mom, Ms. Campbell as Sis and Mr. Isola as Son. There are some funny lines that unexpectedly soothe, like faint breezes during a heat wave. The production, in which the sets are changed by people in Boy Scout uniforms, looks very good, but nothing can disguise the fact that the play is a mess, and too late by a number of decades.

In its writing, " 'WASP' and Other Plays" has the singular misfortune to start off well and slide into total confusion. The production, however, is consistently good.

WASP AND OTHER PLAYS. By Steve Martin. With Nesbitt Blaisdell, Amelia Campbell, Kevin Isola, Carol Kane, Don McManus and Peggy Pope. Sets by Thomas Lynch. Costumes by Laura Cunningham. Directed by Barry Edelstein. At the Joe Papp Public.

MORE THAN 30 YEARS have passed since Jean Shepherdobserved that the only ethnic group in America you could attack with impunity was White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Those 30 years have seen plenty of attacks. In the title play of "WASP and Other Plays," Steve Martin joins the assault.

He shows a WASP family, for example, listening dutifully to fatuous Daddy describe his golf game. Daddy never listens when Mommy or his daughter speaks and he can't have a real talk with his son.

Nevertheless, Martin also has a sympathy for WASPS most satiric sketches lack. Each of his characters hears inner voices that show an imagination, a sensitivity, and sometimes a wacko side behind the placid stereotype.

The other three plays depend on magic tricks, and you come away wondering how they're done rather than what the plays themselves are supposed to be about. If only there were a little more magic in the texts!

The first, "Guillotine," is about a man who buys a guillotine for his living room, and the meticulously thorough maid who has to dust it. Another is about the unhappy love life of a woman who has herself bisected by a zigzag box, which seems to divide her body in three. If I were more serious, I would express outrage about the misogyny implicit in both these plays. My only complaint, however, is that they weren't funnier.

There's a lot of hooey in "Patter for the Floating Lady," which is about a magician expatiating on wanting to give his women a freedom he can control, but you don't pay much attention because you're fascinated by how the title character levitates.