REVIEW: A Picasso

Chris Kendall as Pablo Picasso in Miners Alley Playhouse's brilliant production of A Picasso. Photo credit: Richard H. Pegg

Great drama has both grandness and simplicity about it. A small platform can become the staging area for a battle of titanic ideas, and an audience eavesdropping on a conversation between a painter and a bureaucrat in a dusty storage cellar can suddenly find itself on a thrill ride of epic proportions.

Such is the case with Miners Alley Playhouse's fast and fascinating production of Jeffrey Hatcher's A Picasso, playing in Golden through November 1, 2009.

It's Paris, 1941, and Spanish emigre and renowned painter Pablo Picasso has been summoned on the night before his 60th birthday by German occupation forces to meet with a cultural attache sent by Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Ministry of Culture to authenticate three works attributed to the artist: one from his childhood, another from young adulthood, and a recent doodle. 

Apparently, as Picasso muses, "Anyone can be a painter, but a forger has got to be good."



Sounds harmless enough, except that whenever a Nazi interrogator with a stack of files takes you into a remote cellar, sits you down and casually says "it's just a formality," watch out!


What starts out as a guarded game of cat and mouse irresistibly and inevitably grows into a titanic struggle of wills as the ultimate egotist takes on unbridled arrogance. Insults and threats are exchanged, layers of emotional armor are stripped away, and the audience realizes in fascinated horror that neither combatant is going to leave that cellar unscathed.


And along the way, we get an insight into Picasso's notorious atheism, the result of an unholy attempt to bargain with God for the life of his sister, matched by the attache's conscientious but misguided efforts to save great artists by destroying their creations. There are many magnificent speeches and pithy lines in this two character play. My favorite was "Art can't save a life or stop a war. It can only be great."

Chris Kendall is outstanding as the pompous but deeply wounded Picasso. Paige Lynn Larson's Valkyrie-tough Miss Fischer eventually reveals an unexpectedly sympathetic humanity. Unable to return to his homeland or exhibit his work, Picasso is a frustrated man and artist. But Miss Fischer is equally stymied in her vocation. Alone, they would be merely miserable. Together, the clash is pyrotechnic.



At just 80 minutes in length, A Picasso is filled with ironic humor, builds a sense of foreboding in which no admission of vulnerability goes unpunished, and provides an intimate look at one of the loneliest, most influential, monolithic personalities of the 20th century. Oh, and the ending has a delicious twist.


Thanks to the wonderful performances of Kendall and Larson, the capable and nuanced direction of Robert Kramer, Hatcher's brilliant script, Richard H. Pegg's ordinary yet somehow oppressive set design, and producer Rick Bernstein's unflagging commitment to excellence in every respect, A Picasso is a masterpiece in its own right.



For information and reservations, call 303-935-3044 or visit online at www.minersalley.com.