Wild and crazy meeting

Maybe you think of Steve Martin as the guy who wore an arrow through his head on “Saturday Night Live.” Or maybe you think of him as the beleaguered dad in the “Father of the Bride” movies. This week, however, you should think of him as an accomplished and critically praised playwright.

His play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” opens Friday at the Spokane Civic Theatre’s downstairs Studio Theatre space. This is Martin’s “gently absurdist” comedy about a fictional 1904 meeting between the young Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso in a small Paris bar called the Lapin Agile.

When it opened in New York, almost exactly 10 years ago, New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote, “The piece succeeds in being low-comedy funny while also suggesting that a great scientist and a great artist share a rarefied sense of beauty.”

Canby called it a “very engaging 75-minute shaggy dog of a comedy.”

Einstein, 25, has not yet published his “Special Theory of Relativity.” Picasso, 23, has just begun to make a name for himself as an avant-garde artist.

There was, of course, no such documented meeting between Picasso and Einstein, except in Martin’s fertile creative mind. Their meeting is a way for him to reflect on the similarities between a great scientific mind and a great artistic mind.

Martin also adds a few more characters for comic effect, including Charles Dabernow Schmendimen, a much bigger self-promoter than the young Picasso, confident of his own coming fame. Later another surprise visitor shows up – apparently from a later time.

Those who saw Martin’s later play adaptation, “The Underpants,” in Spokane two years ago already have an idea what to expect. Martin mixes high philosophical musings about physics and art with plenty of bathroom jokes and sex jokes.

“Mr. Martin’s manner is to so mix the sublime with the ridiculous that they can’t easily be disentangled,” wrote Canby.

By the way, the play isn’t entirely absurd. There was a bar in Montmartre called the Lapin Agile (the Nimble Rabbit), frequented by artists. In fact, it still exists.

Donovan Stohlberg, the Civic’s marketing and development director, directs this play. His cast features Jeremy Lindholm as Einstein and Paul Villabrille as Picasso.

The cast also includes Bill Myklebust, Fred Strange, Darcy Durgan, Tessa Gregory, Dave Rideout, Will Gilman and Max Nightser.

This is the opening play of the Civic’s Studio Theatre season.