TOM TITUS -- Theater Preview

It’s well-known that former Orange County resident Steve Martin is a

wild and crazy guy. This weekend, local theatergoers can find out if he’s

also a wild and crazy playwright.

Martin’s absurdist comedy, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” opens for a

two-weekend run Thursday at Orange Coast College, and director John

Ferzacca is pulling no punches in his enthusiasm about both the play and

his cast.

“This is one of the most talented casts I’ve ever assembled in my 30

years at the college,” Ferzacca says. “It promises to be one of the

finest OCC productions ever.”

Ferzacca has a pretty impressive trio to draw on -- Craig Fleming and

Scott Ratner in the roles of Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein, along

with Jessica Marie Hutchinson who, the director declares, “shows great

promise for a future as a professional actress.”

Martin’s play is set in 1904 at the Lapin Agile, a musty bar in the

Montmartre district of Paris. The bar actually existed -- although

Picasso and Einstein never met in real life.

In the “wild and crazy” version of rewritten history, a young and

cocky Picasso encounters the equally imperious Einstein, and their

meeting generates heat, light and firecracker bursts of revelations. Both

geniuses are at the brink of creating their masterpieces.

As events unfold, it’s one year before Einstein will publish his

Theory of Relativity and three years before Picasso’s Cubist breakthrough

with “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon.” When Martin’s two intellectual titans

first meet, they size up each other like schoolboy rivals. Pencils

brandished like swords, they wage a spontaneous art versus science duel.

Fleming and Ratner each bring a ton of stage credits to the OCC

production. Fleming -- onetime director of the Youth Theater at South

Coast Repertory -- is perhaps best remembered at OCC as one of Stephen

Sondheim’s “Assassins,” while Ratner is a master impressionist with more

than 30 local community theater characters to his credit, notably the

lord high executioner in “The Mikado” at the Newport Theater Arts Center.

Hutchinson, who attended USC and graduated from the American

Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, has impressed many in her two

previous appearances at OCC -- in “Tainted Justice” and as contrasting

twin sisters in “The Mineola Twins.”

“Steve Martin has written a fascinating comedy that contains great

wisdom,” Ferzacca declared. His Picasso captured the 1996 Outer Critics’

Circle awards for best play and best writer.

“Picasso at the Lapin Agile” will be staged Thursdays through

Saturdays at 8 p.m. and at 2 p.m. Sundays until Oct. 15 in OCC’s Drama

Lab Theater. Tickets can be ordered by calling (714) 432-5880.

* TOM TITUS previews and reviews local theater for the Daily Pilot.

His work appear Thursdays and Saturdays.