Genius and talent collide when Einstein, Picasso cross paths

in a BPA production.

So this guy goes into a bar, see, and tells the bartender he’s supposed to meet a woman at six o’clock at the Bar Rouge.

“This isn’t the Bar Rouge,” the bartender says. “It’s the Lapin Agile.”

Well, the guy says, it’s like this. I’m a theorist, and the way I see it, there’s just as much chance of her wandering in here accidentally as there is of her wandering into the Bar Rouge on purpose. So where I wait for her and at what time, that just doesn’t matter.

“Unless,” the bartender says, “you really want to meet her.”

“You’re forgetting one thing,” the guy responds. “She thinks like I do.”

(Ba-dum-bum…pish!)

The joke would still be funny even if the guy wasn’t Albert Einstein, which he is. Poised on the threshold of a new century, the mop-haired physicist is about to forever change mankind’s understanding of its place in space and time.

That the next person to stumble into the bar is Pablo Picasso, set to turn the whole history of art on an asymmetrical ear…well, now things start to get fun.

“This play helped me understand that there’s art and science, and the creative impulses for both have a lot more in common than I realized,” said Kate Carruthers, director of the BPA production of “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” opening Jan. 19 at the Playhouse. “And one’s not more important than the other.”

Talent versus genius, and the source of the mysterious creative spark that defines their greatest moments are the themes explored in what also happens to be very funny play, penned in 1993 by comedian, actor, essayist and playwright Steve Martin.

The setting is the Lapin Agile, a legendary watering hole that serviced Paris free-thinkers ca. 1904, frequented by the painter if not the physicist.

Within a few years, Einstein’s theory of relativity will herald a cosmic intellectual shift, while Picasso is about to paint “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a precocious break with form and perspective said to herald the dawn of modern art.

The play asks: What if two of the great minds of the age collided on the cusp of a new age, acutely aware of their potential yet oblivious to its magnitude?

It reveals Martin’s evolution from zany stand-up comic – whose hyper-exaggerated line, “Well, excuuuuse me!” brought him rather unlikely wealth in the late 1970s – to a humorist of unusual depth.

His essays appear in the New Yorker, and he was recently honored with the Mark Twain Prize for lifetime achievement in American humor, from his sendup of film noir, “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” to “All of Me,” which revealed a talent for physical comedy as he and Lily Tomlin shared Martin’s body.

More nuanced fare, like his villainous turn in David Mamet’s “The Spanish Prisoner” and the recent “Shopgirl,” adapted from Martin’s own novella, have defined his later work.

Carruthers’ fascination with Martin began in the 1970s, when she was just out of college and living in Los Angeles.

A regular at the fabled club Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard, the then-unknown Martin was still developing the “wild and crazy guy” schtick, and Carruthers was in the crowd.

“I was very much taken by this unique,

out-there comedian,” she said. “We were all like, ‘Who’s he?’ Who knew whether he would hit or bomb?

“Half the audience wasn’t laughing. He was doing his non-sequiturs, which someone described as ‘the punchlines without the jokes.’”

Martin went on to fame, Carruthers to a career as an attorney with community theater as avocation.

She adored “Lapin Agile” when it was published in American Theatre magazine in 1996, reading it aloud to her husband. On her second try, Carruthers convinced BPA to let her bring the work to the Playhouse stage.

Martin is said to have penned the play after viewing Picasso’s oil “At the Lapin Agile” in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. He was intrigued by a canvas that once hung unframed on the wall of a tavern and 100 years later sold for $41 million.

That moment spawned a humorous meditation on everything from the commercial value of art – why no one buys paintings of Jesus or sheep – to how the 20th century might have looked viewed from its threshold. “Led by Germany,” one character innocently proposes, “this will be known as the century of peace.”

“It’s so full of heart,” Carruthers said of “At the Lapin Agile.” “I think what makes a lot of his stuff so funny is that he’s never mean or cynical. If he makes fun of anybody, it’s himself.”

Brandon Belieu takes the title role of Picasso, a painter struggling to bring his dynamic inner life to the canvas and charming the ladies all the while.

“He’s inspired, although he doesn’t know by what – a prima donna,” Belieu said. “His mind is always working, always coming up with new paintings and new designs, and ways to portray his art in ways that have never been seen before.”

The 11-person cast includes Ned Thorne as Einstein and Rose Mackey as the painter’s consort Suzanne. As Freddy and Germaine, Bart Berg and Bonnie Wallace dispense drinks and wisdom from behind the bar.

Mixed in as foils are the bombastic Schmendeman (Fred Saas) – confidence blessed with neither the genius nor talent to back it up – and a strangely familiar, mutton-chopped visitor from the future who finally reveals to Picasso the impending, luminescent fruits of one really, really good romp with the muse.

Just who gets to experience such moments of clarity, and when? That’s the mystery.

As one character posits: “Talent is the ability to say things well; genius is the ability to, well, say things.”

“Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” the director believes, is the product of a mind imbued with both – and sprinkled with a more important element still. Carruthers recalls the tribute paid by Lily Tomlin, “the only person who’s ever been inside Steve Martin.”

“The brain was really big,” the actress said, “but the heart was bigger.”

* * * * *

The new century

The BPA production of Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” directed by Kate Carruthers, runs Jan. 20-22 and Jan. 26-29 at the Playhouse. Tickets are available at the box office, 842-8569.