Author: Charleston Stage

Genius comes in many forms and certainly comic genius applies to comedian, writer, actor, juggler, and banjo player Steve Martin.  Steve Martin is an American original whose humor is not quite like anything experienced before or since.  It is our good fortune that Martin also has a passion for modern art and for the theatre, passions that gave us Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

      From the first reading in Steve Martin’s home in Hollywood (with Tom Hanks reading the part of Picasso) to an acclaimed production at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre to a laughing-in-the-aisles Off-Broadway run, Picasso at the Lapin Agile has kept ‘em laughing.

      The genius is how Steve Martin makes us laugh.  It’s not really through the plot or clever one-liners—though there are lots of them, but remarkably through an off-the-wall riff on the nature of genius itself or what happens when geniuses (and other visitors) from different worlds sit down to have a drink or two (or three) together.

      Martin sets this cosmic meeting at the Lapin Agile, a bar that is still serving drinks to the artists of Paris.  There Martin imagines a meeting between the young Albert Einstein and young Pablo Picasso.  It is 1904 just before both burst upon the world stage… Einstein with his Theory of Relativity and Picasso with cubism, the spark that ignited the modern art movement.  These two geniuses reinvented art and science in the 20th century.  This imaginary meeting between Al and Pablo is a great “what if” and a terrific launching pad for the fun that follows. 

            Added to this comic cocktail is a cast of eccentrics who stop in at the Lapin Agile, a crazy cast of characters, stirred well and poured up for our enjoyment.  In many ways, it’s like Cheers meets the Twilight Zone with a twist of Third Rock From The Sun thrown in for good measure.  My cast and I have had great fun exploring this wild-and-crazy universe and know you’re in for quite a ride!

 

(Randy Risher as Albert Einstein and Charleston Stage Resident Actor Brian Zane as Pablo Picasso) 

The Lapin Agile (which translates as “the agile rabbit) is a real bar in Paris that still exists.  Picasso immortalized it when he painted At the Lapin Agile that includes a self-portrait of Picasso himself sitting at the bar.  At the turn of the twentieth century, the Lapin Agile was a gathering place for Picasso and his artist friends (and rivals)—artists who would soon transform the way we look at art.  The year is 1904 and, two years later, Picasso would paint his famous Demoiselles d’Avignon, a cubist painting of five women that many believe launched the modern art movement.  About the same time young Albert Einstein, with the publication of his Special Theory of Relativity transformed modern physics and gave scientists a whole new way of looking at the universe.  How we look at the universe and the world around us, our point of view and our perspective—what we see in our mind’s eye is at the core of the human imagination and is the subject of Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile.  Martin of course added his own imaginative touches (Einstein and Picasso never met for instance) to create his own comic universe with its off-the-wall, off-kilter kaleidoscopic view of the world.  In this world, the genius of art and science (and comedy) collide.

 

(Charleston Stage Resident Actor Brian Zane as Pablo Picasso) 

 

Contemporary playwright Steve Martin is probably best known for his stand-up comedy and film work, although he has been writing for stage and screen for many years.  He has starred in over 40 films, including The Jerk, The Pink Panther, Cheaper by the Dozen, Father of the Bride and Planes, Trains & Automobiles.  His screenplays include L.A. Story, Roxanne, The Man With Two Brains, Three Amigos and Shopgirl (which was based on a novella he published in 2000).  Martin’s first book, a collection of short, humorous pieces called Cruel Shoes, was published in 1979.  He has also written a memoir of his time in stand-up comedy, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, a short novel entitled The Pleasure of My Company and Pure Drivel, a second collection of his short works that includes many that were first published in The New Yorker magazine.  The teenage Steve Martin after school worked at the Magic Shop in Disneyland, where he learned to make balloon animals, to juggle and to play the banjo-all bits he would later keep for his comedy act.  He developed a musical that headlined at Knott’s Berry Farm where Martin worked for several summers.  In college at Long Beach, he seriously considered becoming a philosophy professor, but in 1967 he transferred to U.C.L.A. and became a theater major.  While still in college he got a job writing for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour-a job that won Martin an Emmy Award for writing in 1969.  His standup act, despite mixed reception on the road at first, brought him to Johnny Carson’s attention, and Martin became a frequent comedy guest on The Tonight Show.  The 1970s also witnessed his Saturday Night Live! debut and the release of a series of popular comedy albums that unleashed catch phrases such as “Excuse me!” and “I’m a wild and crazy guy.”

Martin gave up his successful standup career to explore writing novels, screen and stage plays though he continues to make guest appearances on Saturday Night Live, as well as, continuing his film career.

Picasso at the Lapin Agile premiered in Chicago, a 1993 production of the Steppenwolf Theater Company.  The show moved to the Westwood Playhouse in Los Angeles, where it was the longest-running play in the theater’s history.  The show came to New York in 1995, where it played off-Broadway to similar success.  Martin’s other writing for the stage includes several one-act plays, and a loose translation of Carl Sternheim’s 1910 play Die Hose (or The Underpants). 

To Kill A Mockingbird was the first and only novel published by Alabama native Nelle Harper Lee.  The story is set in Maycomb, Alabama, a fictionalized version of Lee’s own hometown of Monroeville.  It tells of a young girl coming of age in the rural south while confronting issues of race, class, and gender that are first raised when her lawyer father agrees to represent a black man accused of assaulting a white woman.  Lee’s own father was a lawyer, and admittedly the model for the character of Atticus Finch in the book.  Scout’s childhood friend Dill was also drawn from the author’s personal experience—she grew up living next door to a young Truman Capote!  While Lee’s relationship with Capote soured in their adult years when he took to drinking and refused to dispel a rumor that he had helped Lee write To Kill A Mockingbird, they were close friends when Capote spent his childhood summers with his aunt and uncle in Monroeville.

     Lee built her writing skills while working for literary and humor magazines at Huntington College and the University of Alabama, while pursuing a degree in law like her father and older sister.  One term short of finishing her studies, Lee quit school and moved to New York to focus on her writing.  Her friend Capote eventually introduced her to an agent there, and she spent a number of years toiling over what would become To Kill A Mockingbird while working desk jobs or surviving on her friends’ generosity and faith in her writing skills.  A famous anecdote expresses the frustration Lee often felt with her work during this period.  Supposedly, she once tossed the unfinished manuscript out into the snow, and her editor sent her out to retrieve it.

Published in 1960 to wide acclaim, To Kill A Mockingbird became an instant best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.  The iconic story was quickly made into a Hollywood film that garnered its own buzz.  Starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, it won three Oscars that year, including a best adapted screenplay award for Horton Foote.  It was adapted for the stage in the 1980’s.  Harper Lee’s hometown puts on a huge production of it each summer though the author herself has never attended the play.  In Monroeville, the central trial scenes are performed in the county courthouse.  There, blacks and whites are segregated as they would have been under Jim Crow laws, and white male jurors (the only citizens eligible when the story took place) are chosen from the audience.

     The fame that came along with the success of her novel unsettled Nelle Harper Lee, and after a few years of granting interviews, she retired from public life to focus on her writing again.  She has only published a few essays over the last forty-five years, and prefers to live quietly in her hometown of Monroeville, where locals protect her from the prying eyes of journalists and her legions of fans.

 

 

(The Cast of To Kill A Mockingbird) 

      I was eight years old when To Kill A Mockingbird was published, also about the age of Scout, Jem and Dill.   I remember stacks and stacks of Harper Lee’s classic in the book section of Belks department store in Columbia.  Back then, Belks had a book section and a candy section and the two were next to each other which is why I probably noticed To Kill A Mockingbird.  I remember wondering what this book was about and why it was a best seller.

When I got older and read this story for the first time, I realized that part of its power is in its truth and how well-drawn its characters are—and I would know.   I grew up in a southern community, not very different from Maycomb, Alabama.  I knew practically everyone in my community, black and white, and they knew my family and me.  Like Jem, I thought these were the best people in the world, and they were (and are), but we lived under the cloud of age-old prejudice passed down from generation to generation.  And in those days, in the early 1960’s, we still lived in an age of segregation, one that many of us were only beginning to question.  On another trip to Columbia, I remember lines and lines of quiet, orderly black protesters standing in line at the ticket booths of every movie theatre on Main Street.  There was one on every block in those days.  The protesters asked for seats in the downstairs white-only section and were turned away time after time.   I thought this a curiosity, but like many others my age, thought no deeper.

I remember watching the March on Washington in a hardware store where Dr. King’s “I have a dream speech” was displayed on dozens of TV’s for sale.  Most of all, I remember the white men.  Friends of my father gathered around watching in silence.  In that silence I think I realized for the first time that the times were indeed changing.

In my teens, I remember the Orangeburg massacre only 15 miles away from my house where three students were killed and 27 others wounded when they protested the segregation in a bowling alley on the edge of their all black campus at South Carolina State.  I remember the newspaper headline “All Hell Breaks Loose”.  And I remember the fear that gripped our community.

I remember the first black students who came to my high school in eighth grade, only a handful because in the “freedom of choice”  option,  black students could only attend white schools “If there was room” and not much room had been made for them.  I would really get to know only one of them in four years, only because he reached out to me.

But there was, indeed, an awakening taking place.  It was not swift and it was often unpleasant, but along the way there were people like Harper Lee that prodded us, and the South she loves so much, to look around and right the wrongs around us.  Like many young Southerners I realized that the strife was not just in Birmingham or Montgomery or Memphis, but right here in my own back yard.

A flood of these memories and emotions filled my thoughts when I first directed To Kill A Mockingbird in 1987, and I realized once again how Harper Lee had told this moving story so truthfully, and with such compassion.  As I remember, it was a powerful production with packed houses.  Three other productions followed and, in each, I watched as race relations continued to improve in our country.  But never would I have imagined that when I began to direct this show once more, an African-American would be President of the United States.  But as I look back, I realize that Barack’s journey up those steps to take his oath of office was a path made possible by many small steps traveled by others—Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Dr. King, people like Harper Lee, and most of all by thousands and thousands of others whose names we’ll never know but whose actions literally changed the world.

Does this mean To Kill A Mockingbird is now out of date?  No, for To Kill A Mockingbird was never just about race, it was about our common humanity, our human prejudice against those different from us whether it be their social status, the color of their skin, their religion or even a bias against people who wish to be left alone.   Atticus tells Scout, “You never really know a person until you walk in their shoes.”  That means, we all have a lot of shoes to try on and many more steps to take.   We are most fortunate to have Harper Lee show us the way.

 

(Charleston Stage Resident Actor Sarah Claire Smith as Mayella Ewell and Christopher Gay as Tom Robinson) 

 

 

(David Hallatt as Judge Taylor and David Ardrey as Bob Ewell) 

When our Stage Manager, the delightful Bessie Edwards, called me into her office a few days before the read through of Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird, she pointed at me and said, Boo! I then told her,  “Bessie, it’s mid December, Halloween is over!” She then ups me by saying, “No, you’re going to be our Boo!” I was astonished! I had originally been assigned to be in the ensemble, but to take on a role once played by Robert Duvall, his first movie gig ever, sign me up!

I first read To Kill A Mockingbird freshman year of high school.  Back then I was emotionally touched during the trial scene and by the character of Boo Radley. I carefully studied the dialogue of the play and the novel over the next couple of weeks after I heard of the change in my role. I focused on Jem and Scout’s descriptions of Boo in the book and the history of the Radley family. To be the hero (aside from Atticus Finch (Vic Clark) in this play is just a dream to me. Altering my physical movement to stiff arms, slanted shoulders, a tilted head and a crooked right foot, I am enjoying the transformation into Mr. Arthur Radley. Typically, I am very use to portraying characters who show outlandish physical gestures on stage, and to bring down the physical comedy and adapt to barely lifting a finger while still creating powerful moments onstage has been a great challenge to pursue.  

 

(Resident Actor Andy McCain as Arthur “Boo” Radley) 

Ever since I was little, I have dreamed of being an actor.  And that dream is slowly but surely coming true!  Since this is my first role, I thought it would be easy because I love to act. But it wasn’t as easy as I thought – it got harder and harder until I learned my lines.  Now, I am very excited for all of the upcoming performances.  I didn’t expect to get the role of Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird” – – in fact, I didn’t know who she was until I read the book.   The character is unlike me in a couple of ways: she wears overalls, for one thing; I wear shorts.  And she’s really brave (I’m not saying that I’m not brave. . . just not that brave).  I have learned so much working with all of my fellow actors, have made some new friends, and have had a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy the play!

 

 

(Charleston Stage Theatre School students Suzanne McDonald as Scout and Sam Cass as Jem) 

Atticus Finch is a role that I have long dreamed of playing. One of the plusses, I guess you could say of middle age, meant that I was now old enough to play him!  So when the season was announced, I put my hat in the ring for the part and I was fortunate enough to get the role.  Preparing for the role has been fun, exhilirating, at times stressful and always rewarding.  I have drawn on my experiences raising my own daughters and also growing up in a small southern town, Shelbyville, TN., in the 1960’s.  While integration, for the most part, had taken place in the schools by then, I can still remember the impact it had on my elementary school.  I can also remember the “colored section” in the old movie theater up on the square in downtown Shelbyville.  That had also pretty much gone by the wayside thank goodness during my early formative years, but the entrance to the stairs leading up to the colored section was still there.Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m a pretty laid back kind of guy which is one of the characteristics of Atticus, but he also needs to have some fire in him to persuade the jury of Tom’s innocence.  My main challenge has been to clearly represent a multi-faceted human being capable of rearing two children in a loving but responsible way as well as face the challenges of defending Tom Robinson, which could not have been an easy task in 1935 Maycomb, Alabama!

 

(Victor Clark as Atticus Finch) 

Saturday we had our first dress rehearsal for To Kill A Mockingbird at Memminger Auditorium.  This followed over 6 hours of technical rehearsals where we added lights, sound effects and rehearsed scene shifts.  (The play has 5 settings:  The Finch front porch and yard, the town jail, the Courthouse square, Atticus’s office and of course the courtroom which is pictured below.

Resident Costumer Barbara Young has outdone herself on the more than 3 dozen period costumes for the show.  Barbara has recreated 1935 Maycomb, Alabama with period costumes ranging from overalls to ladies hats and gloves to three piece men’s suits to period bloomers and union suits.

Set designer Stefanie Christensen’s original backdrop of the Maycomb County Courthouse is seen in the background.

At the center of many southern towns stands the county courthouse,  often the most majestic structure in the county.  It’s often the town’s major landmark and a symbol of pride.  So when Charleston Stage’s resident scenic designer Stefanie Christensen and I began talking about To Kill A Mockingbird, we thought it would be a perfect touch to put the Maycomb County courthouse (the fictional setting for To Kill A Mockingbird) at the center of our set.  Fortunately, Stefanie is a talented scenic artist, that’s her below working on the courthouse backdrop she’s creating for To Kill A Mockingbird.  Though not finished, it’s quite majestic, standing over 30 feet tall. Some might be surprised to learn that all of our sets here at Charleston Stage are unique and original and built right here in Charleston.  When we get the script for a show we don’t get set designs and we don’t copy designs from other productions.  This allows us to use our imagination to create something new and exciting for every production and I think for To Kill A Mockingbird, you’ll see that Stefanie and her technical staff  have created something very evocative of a southern small town.  Julian Wiles, Director