Playwright: Steve Martin. At: St. Sebastian Players at St. Bonaventure Catholic Church, 1625 W. Diversey. Phone: 773-404-7922; $15. Runs through: March 8. Photo by John Oster
"If [ your story ] is funny, you can sell a lot of books!" the waitress at the Lapin Agile tavern advises a young writer named Albert Einstein, whose Special Theory of Relativity proved a best-seller despite its lack of waggish repartee. Other authors have long heeded this precept, however, camouflaging potentially weighty contemplations under a thick veneer of slapstick, cross-talk and reliable merriment.
Sometimes it takes a half-century before their secret is found out ( only in recent years has Neil Simon's talent been fully appreciated ) , but no wait was necessary to detect the intelligence behind comedian Steve Martin's salute to the second millennium. Though the scenario locates us in the belle-époque Paris of 1904, the sentiments expressed by the visitors on the day depicted—among them, Pablo Picasso and the aforementioned Einstein, along with various other eccentric figures—reflect hopes, fears and speculations not unlike those we encounter today in our first decade of a new century.
We in 2009 have the benefit of hindsight, however, giving us the option of smugly dismissing Picasso at the Lapin Agile as simple anachronism-fueled satire, and its sometimes arcane wordplay as geek-humor at best, cartoonish absurdity at worst. But director Steven Walanka is not content to merely let the play's brains leak through the laughs, instead instructing his actors to lend their material no more artifice than the characters themselves possess. Since any group of boho artists, in any century, can be assumed to include a number of affected posturers, no sacrifice of witticisms, smart or dumb, are necessary to maintain a suitably jocular ambience.
Church basements present their own architectural problems, but Matt Godlewski and Mike Patrick's scenic design expands the shallow stage by seating front-row spectators at cocktail tables presumably composing part of the Lapin Agile's interior—a conceit facilitated by frequent breaks with fourth-wall conventions ( notably a cameo scene involving an intrusive art groupie, played by a different actress at every performance ) . The ensemble for this St. Sebastian Players production exhibits admirable discipline, never engaging in self-indulgent grandstanding ( in particular, the bantamweight Luke Daigle, whose lusty Picasso is more than a match for female skeptics taller and/or brawnier than he ) , rendering Martin's fanciful premise a fable not only for the time left before 2010, but for the ages to follow.
