How to Steal A Piscasso

Or: The Little Masters

Or: Top This

Or: Death of a Cracker-Salesman

How rare it is to find an outrageous play. Not hard-edged (seen too often) or fantastical (so rarely done well) but simply staggering in its sheer audacity, the brink-ship of its plot and paint fumed fed exuberance of its script. Such is How To Steal A Picasso by William Missouri Downs, far more than a show about family and art, but about the spirit of daring greatly. From the first moment we begin with the two octane-level twins Casey and Johnny Smith (Elizabeth Rathbone and David Kepner) playing a timeless game of relating adventures, each rounded with a “Top That!” Downs lets us know his game in seconds and then jumps to and drives right through it.

For the Smith’s, an infamous clan of inner-Detroit, wildness is in their blood, as much as art molds their imagination and grim obscurity and humiliation proves their destinies. Casey moonlights as a graffiti master tagger but pays the bills working as a security guard in the monolith she hates, the Detroit Institute of the Arts. Otto (Gordon Reinhart), the painting patriarch, has labored for years to be recognized as the genius he knows himself to be, in the company of his model/muse/wife Belle (Jodeen Revere), while paying the bills working as a tour guide for DIA, pointing out all the artists the Important People decided mean more than him. And as for Johnny, well he spent his youth making forgeries of famous artworks before breaking with his family and heading to New York and becoming that most denigrate of all professions, a lawyer. But now he has returned on the day his father has finally netted his ticket to success, the first annual Yoko Ono Life Time Achievement Award For Unorganized Artists in Nonobjective Mediums. Which just so happens to be the day a priceless Picasso is stolen from the museum leading an institutional Ax-man Bruno Walker (Chris Canfield) to drag the family from their own tiny asylum to the block.

In the staged reading by currently crystallizing Opal Theater Company (directed by a deft Joshua Rippy, Opal’s Artistic Director) the play hums and pulses with a frenetic energy, each performer adding their own particular vibration. Rathbone (the company’s co-founder and Production Manager it should be noted) delights in Casey’s bad behavior, skipping around in the very picture of chipper anarchy, with the occasional touching show of softness as she nudges her family, or the world at large, to something kinder. Reinhardt lets himself sway into an old-school-theatrical continuous tearing passion, full of gestures designed to grab the scrotum of the cosmos and the tumescent pronouncements of a King Lear or, more accurately, a beatnik Willy Loman. Kepner operates at a lower frequency but his subdued manner masks a madness akin to those around him (“I don’t want to kill my father,” He opines at one point, “Every artist wants to kill their father, I want to humiliate him.” the play might have a hard time balancing its philosophy of art with its theory on progeny but that line gets as close as it gets to a perfect synthesis.) Of particular note in this cast of worthies is Revere’s Belle, and Canfield’s Walker. The former vibrates at such a high frequency she distorts reality around her; it's a breakneck performance that Revere not only nails but cracks open revealing what could be a troublesome character to be undeniably wonderfully fun. So too does Canfield, in a superb turn, come at a character and manner so foreign to the Smiths that he shifts the play around himself, at once managing to make the manager terrifying, contemptuous, and sympathetic as his icy cool of his logical kingdom slowly evaporates, and then calves into a most impressive splash.

But even beyond being a wild comedy about big personalities and bigger deeds the play knows where its head is. While denied for a life and even afterlife of fame and fortune and success as a Great Master, each of the Smith’s is perfectly content to be the master of their own fates, to use their talents and skills to make their own lives as fierce and independent and awe-inspiring as they wish. They also all fervently believe, as Mr. Walker most fervently doesn’t, that art ought to be judged by the awe it inspires, rather than the price it fetches, that it ought to be important because you find it so, not because someone told you it ought to be. It’s quite a bit too chew on between breathless stretches of disbelieving laughter, as each member tries in their own way to top the excess of the ones before. Sometimes it might buoy itself above its bounds but all in all, How To Steal a Picasso is an outrageously good play.