"...not a gentle play...But it is a strong one"

May 20, 2007 performance review by Frances Benn Hall

Thom Christopher, Gretchen Egolf
photo: Kevin Sprague

For its season opening on its newly configured stage (theatre in the round) at the Athenaeum, the Barrington Stage Company has chosen an intriguing and riveting play, Jeffrey Hatcher's, A Picasso. A play that invites members of the audience to meet a Picasso they never knew.

The two character play, a duel fought out in ninety minutes of playing time, concerns the big questions. Can art survive censorship? Could an artist knowingly condemn his own work? To what lengths would he go to preserve it?

The time is the early 1940's during the German occupation of Paris, and Picasso (Thom Christopher) has been grabbed on the street and shut in a drab basement room to await his interrogator. The lights come up on his sturdy. defiant figure seated waiting –beret at a jaunty angle. The door is opened by a beautiful, sexy woman, her trim figure buttoned rigidly into uniform and a Nazi pin in her lapel.

The first demand of this entrant, Miss Fisher, a Gestapo art critic turned interrogator (Gretchen Egolf) is that Picasso remove his beret. And the sparks begin to fly. Picasso hurling scoffing punch lines that bring a bitter humor into a duel which each is determined to win.

Picasso learns that he h as been sequestered to identify or condemn as frauds, three small drawings—signed by him and to be shown at an "exhibit". During the course of the play, for various reasons, he will condemn all as frauds, or hint that all are authentic.

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A Picasso - thorugh June 3 at The Berkshire Athenaeum

Even when his wily interrogator agrees that if he will identify one as his, he will be free to leave, (and reminds him that the next day being his birthday, he will otherwise, as enemy alien be sent to an "elsewhere" such as Germany or Spain), he parries with her until she threatens, "I have to walk out with a Picasso. You have to walk out."

With an unflinching passion for art, and an unwillingness to let any art be destroyed by anyone at any time for any reason, Picasso counters all her arguments with rapid fire witticisms, subjects her to long narratives as to how and when and why he drew a picture, only to blur it all with a sudden undermining denial. He can be brutal as well as witty, and his language can be vulgar and dismissive.

The argument and plot swirl back and forth, the tension (and confusion as to the authenticity of the paintings) mounts to an ending you will find yourself discussing heatedly as you leave the theatre. Who wins and at what cost?

Both of the actors are skilled and mesmerizing. Their cat and mouse game is played out at a pace that never falters, and the playwright is always two jumps ahead of where one thought his plot was going.

Christopher's Picasso is, one should feel, "our man," on our side in that brutal war. We want to root for him; yet he is cruel, bawdy, manipulative, as well as extremely witty. As played he evokes constant laughter, even in situations of great seriousness to his committed belief in the sacredness and importance of art. All sides of his mercurial character are brought out by the actor, and he can make an act as simple-seeming as the folding of his beret, into a sculpted mound, significant.

Thom Christopher, Gretchen Egolf
photo: Kevin Sprague

Egolf is equally capable. Technically she is the "bad guy," the enemy whom we must hate, both because of her side in the war and because of her agreeing, despite her former commitment to great art, to seem to be willing to destroy and condemn it. But by the play's end she has been given a decision to make that is a shocker and one can feel a crazy sympathy for her plight—a brutal reminder of the impulse to survive. Hers too is a demanding role and played to the hilt.

Director Tyler Marchant keeps the pace going, the timing excellent, and draws from his actors the venom that pulses in their dialog as they "make the rounds" that an audience encircled stage demands, while at the same time having their movements intensify the plot and seem perfectly natural.

The newly configured "in the round" stage has only one limitation. From my excellent press seat in a front row center, unfortunately two spot lights on the opposite wall when in use, beamed straight into my eyes like an approaching car's head-lights making me screen the dazzle with a hand above my forehead. in a rather melodramatic gesture. Perhaps they could be tilted differently.

This play may not please all. It is not a gentle play and language flies all over the place. But it is a strong one, dealing with values of great importance—ones my driver and I found ourselves discussing all the way back home to Lenox.

So, congratulations, Julianne Boyd, your theatre group is off to a good start in its second year in Pittsfield.