PICASSO AT THE LAPIN AGILE by Steve Martin

Directed by David Colacci

University of Missouri-Kansas City

Performing Arts Center, Spencer Theatre

Nov. 5 through Nov. 14, 2004

UMKC Central Ticket Office 816-235-6222

Picasso at the Lapin Agile is the first play written by Steve Martin, one of America’s most treasured comic actors. The play is a unique mixture of the whimsical and the profound. Martin invents a meeting of a young and undiscovered Pablo Picasso and the equally young and unproven Albert Einstein in 1904 in a Parisian pub, the Lapin Agile. The ridiculous mixes with the sublime as the two men engage in a battle of ideas about probability, lust, artistic integrity and the future. Martin’s play is a compelling examination of science and art and their impact on a rapidly changing society.       

David Colacci, director, has worked as an actor and director at many of America’s prominent regional theatres: the Cleveland Play House, San Diego's Old Globe, The Seattle Rep, A Contemporary theatre, The Actors theatre of Louisville, the Guthrie theatre, Chicago's Wisdom Bridge and Northlight theatres, People's Light in Philadelphia, the New Rep in Boston, and many others. For eight years, he was resident artist at the Cleveland Play House and for 13 years he has been artistic director of the Hope Summer Repertory theatre.  Of note, he played Einstein in the Cleveland Play House production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which toured to the National theatre of Hungary in Miskolcz and Budapest in 1999.