Also this issue:

Worlds of Wonder
“Cabinets of Curiosities” is a magical journey through time and spaces.
-Robin Rice

20/20 Vision
Snyderman Gallery celebrates 20 years in the furniture business.
-Lori Hill

“A Night at the Casbah”
-Lori Hill

Baseball panel discussion
-Andrew Milner

Louis Faurer: A Photographic Retrospective
-John Vettese

Sherman Alexie
-John Freeman

Bloomsday Celebration
-Lori Hill

Frankie Avalon
-Interview by A.D. Amorosi

June 12-18, 2003

theater

A Picasso

by David Anthony Fox

I wonder which audience members will get more pleasure here: Picasso’s fans … or his detractors? The upper hand continually shifts in Jeffrey Hatcher’s play, which is receiving its world-premiere production at PTC. A Picasso blends fiction with fact in a way that is often sly and entertaining, though ultimately not sufficiently profound.

Hatcher's invention is this: In Paris during the Nazi occupation, a police cohort has escorted Picasso (already an internationally famous artist) to a basement that contains a trove of paintings. Once there, a female Gestapo agent confronts him and demands that he authenticate three pictures presumed to be his. When Picasso learns the reason for the request, he and the agent launch a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game that will go many different places, and involve several reversals of fortune.

It's a clever conceit, and potentially more than that. Indeed, Hatcher's play could explore very substantial issues, particularly the nature of art, and its relationship to politics. In fact, he touches on both areas. The script gestures knowingly at art criticism, and the presence of the Nazi regime is milked as a palpable source of suspense. The dialogue is swift and bracing.

Ultimately, though, the play is really about the developing relationship between the artist and Miss Fischer, the Gestapo agent whose shifting motives give the play its ballast. There's craftsmanship here, too, but it's inconsistent, and hobbled by a thinness in the character writing.

Picasso seems drawn mostly from popular mythos; he's arrogant, misogynistic and deliberately contrary. All of this may well be reality, but Hatcher is unable to balance it with a sense of the extraordinary gifts behind it, and as a result the artist seems minimized. (Like Amadeus, A Picasso falls into the trap of "the genius play," and focuses more on the human foibles, which are comprehensible, than the talent, which is not.)

It's the opposite problem with Miss Fischer. I don't want to give away too much here, but A Picasso depends greatly on the twists and turns of her character, and in the end she seems more like a necessary dramaturgical device than a believable human being.

At PTC, director John Tillinger's production has an appropriately sinister, period look, and he has the advantage of two fine actors. Lisa Banes -- who is made here to look uncannily like Meryl Streep -- occasionally seems too theatrical (the fault is more the script's than hers) but is an undeniable presence. Jeffrey DeMunn makes an irascible but ultimately moving and endearing Picasso.

A Picasso

Through June 22, Philadelphia Theatre Company at Plays & Players, 1714 Delancey St., 215-569-9700.