Stage Design
Picasso At The Lapin Agile by Steve Martin
The twentieth century was all about perspective: Albert Einstein was discovering the fourth dimension while Pablo Picasso was eliminating the third. Steve Martin's play presents a great cosmic joke: a physicist and a cubist walk into a bar…but the punch line comes when Elvis joins them and blows the roof off the joint. The bar is the historic Lapin Agile in Paris, circa 1904. The idea for this unit set was to conflate Cubist ideas about pictorial space with familiar scenic conventions like exaggeration, distortion, and forced perspective. At the end of the play the walls break apart and roll away revealing a backdrop of stars.