In A Picasso, continuing at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse through March 25, playwright Jeffrey Hatcher takes us to conflicted Vichy France, where a society renowned for fostering artistic freedom was suddenly under the boot of a paranoid culture at its most oppressive. From 1940 until 1944, France was divided into an area occupied by Nazi Germany and one administered by the hastily devised Vichy-based French government, which collaborated with the Germans.
Paris, in the occupied section, is the setting for this fictional face-off between Pablo Picasso, played by Peter Michael Goetz, and a less-than-committed German official named Ms. Fischer, played by Roma Downey. Through these two, Hatcher provides sketches of censorship at its most insane and unjust, and a creative genius at his most embattled.
In its mad rush to brainwash people into agreement, the Nazi propaganda machine not only generated sanctioned “art” that promoted its narrow racial profile, it also set about discrediting and destroying degenerative art - Entartete Kunst as they called it. Cowed and genocidal as they became, many Germans were nevertheless highly educated and culturally advanced. Deep within the officious, dispassionate Ms. Fischer, a pilot light still flickers with appreciation for the creative breakthroughs and historic achievements that had emerged in this city before Hitler’s rise.
Geffen Producing Director Gilbert Cates directs this West Coast premiere in the Playhouse’s smaller Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, configured with seating on opposite sides of a central playing area. An imaginative set by François-Pierre Couture sits like a huge, shuttered newspaper stall one might find in a subway.
Replicas of the Entartete Kunst paintings adorn chain link that clings to the sidewalls of the auditorium. Ms. Downey, looking every inch the ‘40s screen siren, enters through a doorway dressed up as an elevator and, in clipped steps, approaches the vault-like cube. With the press of a button she puts the large metal roll-up doors in motion, raising a foreboding curtain and revealing a simple underground room with shelves, files, and a central interrogation of table and chairs.
Out of respect for the seriousness of the situation, Cates has kept the actors’ exchanges doggedly earnest and devoid of playfulness. The solid Goetz gives Picasso the stature and hubris we would expect, but he seems restrained from letting the renowned womanizer expose what, even in this situation, should be an irrepressible desire to charm a woman of Fischer’s beauty.
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