Steve Martin is one of America's treasured comedic actors, having appeared in some of the most popular movies of our time. He is also an accomplished screenwriter who has for the past few years turned his attention to writing plays. The results, collected here, demonstrate new facets of the range and talent he possesses on screen. His plays hilariously explore very serious questions about love and happiness and the meaning of life; they are rich with equal parts pain and slapstick humor, torment and wit. Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Steve Martin's first full-length play, opened at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater before moving on to Los Angeles (where it was the longest-running show in the history of the Westwood Playhouse) and, finally, to New York. An imagined meeting of Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in 1904 - when both men were in their twenties - it is a compelling examination of science and art and their impact on a rapidly changing society. As the two men engage in a battle of ideas about probability, lust, artistic integrity, and the future, the play moves with ease between the breezy and the profound. Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays contains three one-acts, first presented together at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York. WASP depicts an archetypal middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family trying to live up to the routine of an idealized fifties suburbia. It is a dark and surreal comedy - a broad satire punctuated with insightful and poetic moments of irony. A meditation on the nature of love and loneliness, The Zig-Zag Woman concerns a woman so desperate to find affection that, with the help of a magic trick, she appears to divide her body into three parts. In the final play, Patter for the Floating Lady, a magician plans to levitate his assistant in order to give her what he could not give her when they were together: freedom. Ever wonder what it would have been like if wild and crazy Steve Martin had written an episode of "The Twilight Zone"? Well, wonder no more. The zany actor/comedian made playwright rookie of the year with this, the script of his first comedy, set in a bar in 1904 Paris. Two of the regulars, twentysomethings Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein, argue about the art of physics and the physics of art as they try to impress and bed a pretty girl. And then the space/time/culture continuum ruptures, and they're joined by a figure from the future who seems to be . . . Elvis Presley! Read for yourself why the show's been done Off-Broadway and at regionals around the country. Actor-comedian Martin is also an accomplished writer of screenplays, short stories, and now stage plays. The present work is his first full-length play and has enjoyed commercial success in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. It depicts an imaginary meeting of Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in 1904 Paris, exploring the impact of art and science on our rapidly changing society. A surprise visit by Elvis adds some satiric commentary from a late-20th-century perspective. Among the other three short plays is Wasp, a stinging look at idealized 1950s suburban life. Though not essential, this is recommended for modern drama collections in larger public and academic libraries.?Howard E. Miller, M.L.S., St. Louis Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Martin came late to theater, after a long career in nightclubs, TV, and movies, and his first full-length play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile , shows it. The premise is clever and a bit gimmicky: Picasso and Einstein, both on the verge of greatness, meet and talk at a Paris bistro before World War I. Once Martin maneuvers the great men onto the stage, though, he doesn't seem to know how to deepen the comedy into a play of ideas, nor does he manage, except in fits and starts, the bittersweet mixing of wit, whimsy, and jaded silliness that typifies his best films, Roxanne and L.A. Story . Still, the play is funny, with some pointed observations on creativity and the parallels between cubism and modern physics. Also included in this edition are The Zig-Zag Woman , The Patter for the Floating Lady , and WASP absurdist one-act works reminiscent of his wild and crazy 1970s stand-up routines. Jack Helbig Used Book in Good Condition