Steve Martin Talks About His Plays, Including ‘Picasso’ At Long Wharf

Everyone knows that Steve Martin is a very funny guy. Most might even know that he is a first-rate banjo musician and perhaps some are aware of his savvy work as a screen writer, novelist and art collector.

But though his output as a playwright has been modest, his two full-length plays — “Picasso at the Lapine Agile” and “The Underpants” — have been critical and popular pieces. “Picasso at Lapine Agile” is now playing at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre this month, staged by artistic director Gordon Edelstein.

But what made Martin — after being a star in comedy, film and TV — write for the theater in the first place?

“I was in New York City at the time and going to plays and I thought theoretically this should be right up my alley,” he said recently in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. “I was enchanted with the idea of being able to change things with a play. With a movie you’re limited to how much you can correct it, but with a play you’re not. You can change it every night if you want, at least for a while. You can keep fixing it and that’s what I liked about it.”

In school, Martin says he studied literature and theater and “all the standards like ‘Death of a Salesman.’ But the play that I really loved was Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ but then I read his ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’ and that was the first play that really stuck in my head. It was very funny and it broke the fourth wall and was like theater of the absurd.”

Young Genius

The subject matter of Martin’s first play, which was produced in 1993, also tapped into Martin’s smart-funny sensibility as well as his appreciation of the art world.

The play is set in a Parisian cafe in Montmartre in 1904 where artists and intellectuals gathered at the turn of the last century. In Martin’s world two of the greatest minds of the 20th century happen to meet there: artist Pablo Picasso and scientist Albert Einstein, young geniuses on the cusps of their greatest creations.

“A lot of the acts of genius take place while people are young but Picasso’s case he was active his whole life,” says Martin. “But still, his major works took place while he was young. It’s shocking how young he was — he was just in his 20s. And Einstein was also very young when he came up with the theory of relativity. There’s a particular excitement that goes with [being young and a genius].”

Also inspiring Martin in his playwriting were two biographies of Picasso, one by Ariana Huffington, “Picasso: Creator and Destroyer”, and another by John Richardson, “A Life of Picasso, Volume I: 1881-1906.”

“Ariana talked about Picasso’s love life much more than John, who talked more about his early days at the Lapin Agile (which translated means “Nimble Rabbit”). Between those two books I became really fascinated about Picasso as a young genius. When I first started writing the play it was going to be exclusively about him but then when I sat down to write, after a scene or two all of a sudden Albert Einstein walked in — and I just kept on writing.”

But the dialogue between the two took unexpected turns.

“I remember talking to [comedian] Martin Mull who said a lot of people think that when painters get together they talk about aesthetics and high-minded things but really what they talk about are paints and brushes. That stuck in my mind and I really liked the idea of meeting these guys before they were famous — and explore what was going on in their heads.

“I was also very interested in having the idea of a pretender in the mix (character named Schmendiman) because these guys were certifiable geniuses very early on in their lives and I just needed a guy in there, someone who loves himself and gets a lot of glory but really doesn’t have much [talent] to stand on.”

Was there an artist hangout in Martin’s own early days?

“It was the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, which was a bar and showcase place where everybody in my younger days — I was 20 or so — hung out, like the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt and well, you name it. This was where everybody went. I think I was the only comedian and we just communed there. That’s where our life centered around.”

When asked, he says that it would be highly unlikely that anyone would write a play years from now called” Steve and Linda at the Troubadour.” “I don’t think it would be as interesting as [Picasso and Einstein].”

Millennium Play

Martin says he is surprised that his play is so regularly performed more than 20 years after it was first produced “because it is very much about the millennium.”

But the play’s characters also talk a lot about great shifts of thinking that could be relevant in any age.

In Martin’s play a character says: “Sometimes the future is handed to you so casually you can miss it.”

Has there been a moment of casual milestone for him?

“Yes, I had a certain realization in the early ’70s that the world was going to change. That’s when I cut off my beard and got rid of my hippie clothes and put on a suit. In a matter of a day I was not the comedian of the past any more.

I was living in my future. I was a comedian for the next age.”

What happened that day?

“Oh, nothing,” he says matter-of-factly. “I just realized it. There wasn’t a lighting bolt. I’m sure it was just a thought that there were so many things happening that were changing and that I had to change, too.”

When the play first came out, Martin said the writing of it “really revitalized me and gave me a perspective of how to write with a more honest approach. It renewed my soul…and gave me such a boost at a time when I thought I would never get a boost.”

Martin says he realized he needed “to do something kind of interesting. What I didn’t realize I was already doing it” in a subconscious way, thinking about it all the time, I would be riding a bicycle and a line would pop in my head.”

In writing the play “I was really at one with the piece and I wasn’t second guessing myself.”

‘Bright Star’

Martin says he doesn’t see himself returning to performing on stage in a play because of performing “too many shows per week”. His last New York acting performance was in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” in 1988 that co-starred Robin Williams and was directed by Mike Nichols.

Though Martin doesn’t have a new play on the horizon, he is active in the theater world now with a new musical he wrote with Edie Brickell, “Bright Star,” which just ended a run at the not-for-profit Old Globe in San Diego.

Charles Isherwood of The New York Times wrote: “At its best, ‘Bright Star’ seduces with its retro roots score and its sincerity in telling an old-fashioned story of love betrayed and redeemed. It has the forthright and, yes, sentimental appeal of a Norman Rockwell painting (he’s respectable again, you know), as well as a plain-spoken charm…”

Joey Parnes, who produced “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” is guiding the show for a commercial run. “We’re now looking for a theater to bring it to Broadway,” he says.

“We wrote an album together and we had a working method.,” says Martin of Brickell. “It’s going along really well and we’re very happy with the way out came out. We keep working on it. It’s a process and you’re never done, especially with a musical because it’s so big. With a play you can say ‘Ya, I think I’m done,’ but with a musical, it’s so many things.”

“PICASSO AT THE LAPIN AGILE” runs through Dec. 21 at Long Wharf Theatre’s main stage at 222 Sargent Drive in New Haven. Information at www.longwharf.org, 203-787-4282.