Leiris/Picasso

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More About

• Pablo Picasso
• Michel Leiris
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Albert Camus
• Tyler Jenich

“We try not to have so many guests. It disturbs what’s left of the neighbors,” says Michel as he stumbles around his Paris home in the dark, falling down stairs, knocking over crudités, and scalding himself on a teakettle. It’s all rather amusing ... until you realize that it’s 1944 and there’s a Nazi patrol outside. This just the sort of dark humor that characterizes writer-director David Jette’s farcical take on an actual evening at the house of Michel Leiris (Michael Bulger) when members of the French Resistance produced Pablo Picasso’s play, Desire Caught by the Tail. The play itself is nonsensically awful (but oh, how the man could paint), so Jette has instead written about the circumstances surrounding its production, a sort of play without a play. In it, Leiris, his wife Zette (Jenny Byrd), Albert Camus (Tyler Jenich), Jean-Paul Sartre (Patrick Baker), Simone de Beauvoir (Amy K. Harmon), and Picasso’s mistress Dora Maar (Melissa Powell) scramble to set up while they wait for the master. Besides their own petty but hilarious squabbles, they also have to deal with a Nazi (Joseph L. Roberts) who keeps popping up, as well as the leader of the resistance, Sam Beckett (Dan Gordon). Jette’s direction keeps all the moving parts well synchronized as the actors enter and exit Juliana de Abreu’s well-designed, multi-door set. The ensemble is strong overall, though Baker’s over-the-top bombastic caricature of Sartre and Bulger’s sincerity as the put-upon host stand out. And while the work isn’t historically accurate, it succeeds because, as Camus says, sometimes “happiness feels better than truth.” Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd., L.A.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; thru July 24. (213) 290-2782, BrimmerStreet.org
Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Starts: June 12. Continues through July 24, 2010