Jeffrey Hatcher's A Picasso is an interesting if not terribly deep conversation between a German official and the great Picasso himself in Nazi-occupied Paris. What's best in the play is the portrait of the artist as arrogant, vain, self-dramatizing and yet charming.
Hatcher depends on our fascination with celebrity to keep us attentive: We hear detailed descriptions of Picasso's birth (it was at first thought that he was stillborn), his relations with a younger sister, the many women he slept with, his friendship with poet and art critic Apollinaire. We also get a taste of the enormous Picasso ego (according to one biographer, not cited here, he used to walk around saying "I am God, I am God").
The weakest aspect of the play is its plot: After a strong start, next to nothing happens but talk, talk and talk — and when finally the relationship between the two main characters begins to change, the drama is just about over.
Author Hatcher shows an impressive knowledge of Picasso's biography, but the qualities that make a play exciting — suspense, engagement of the audience's emotions, originality of vision, the sense of something terribly important at stake — are mostly missing. I learned a few things about the 20th century's most famous artist. But I never had the sense that, beyond the available facts, author Hatcher had anything else to relate.
The premise of the play is that Picasso has been arrested and compelled to meet an official of the German Ministry of Culture in a vault under the streets of Paris. This bureaucrat, Mrs. Fischer, is a no-nonsense type who insists that the artist rule on the authenticity of three apparent Picassos: a drawing of an infant, another of a young man and the third of a crucified minotaur surrounded by women and a death's head. At first Picasso is cagey, but when Fischer tells him that she can have him sent back to Franco's Spain or to the care of the Gestapo, he admits that all the drawings are his.
But then Fischer lets drop that the three artworks aren't on their way to an exhibition; instead they're going to be burned by the Nazis as prime examples of degenerate art. Now Picasso changes his tune: If Fischer goes through with the burning, he'll swear that the works were forgeries and that the Nazis were deceived. But Fischer needs at least one real Picasso to burn — for reasons of her own — and Picasso needs to stay out of fascist clutches. How each will get what he/she needs — whether each will get what he/she needs — is the dramatic question that's supposed to keep us hanging on every word.
And the show's two actors, under the solid direction of Anna Brennen, do everything they can to make this question count. As Picasso, Petrus Antonius is ultimately convincing, though at first he lacks the demonic self-obsession that reportedly wrecked many of the artist's lovers and family members. The real Picasso was a bastard who let his friend Max Jacob die in a Nazi prison rather than make an effort on his behalf, but Antonius at first plays the artist as an ingratiating trickster with a gleam in his eye and a talent for the bon mot. Once he starts trying to rescue his paintings from the flames, though, we begin to see his hard edges, and by the end of the play he's become the dangerous Svengali whose lifelong ambition was to turn "goddesses" into doormats.
Linda Slade, as Fischer, also takes a journey in the course of the play, starting as a puritanical and utterly businesslike civil servant and ending as an emotional, conflicted human being no longer immune to the Picasso hypnosis. Slade is strongest in the first half of the play, when Picasso's sexual overtures seem not just to offend but actually to disgust her, and she manages to make Hatcher's dialogue — which at times is nothing more than Q&A for guest artist Picasso — seem genuine and logical.
But Hatcher wants Fischer to change significantly by the play's end, and Slade does so with perhaps more emotion than the rather intellectual text can support. Still, it's delightful when she suggests, even for a moment, that Picasso has found in her a soul as predatory as his own.
This article appears in Jan 23-29, 2008.