I still think of  as Connecticut Heritage Productions as being Middletown-based but this  vital, decades-old company has brought a whole bunch of shows to New Haven over the years. CHP’s Peter Loffredo has taught and directed at the Educational Center for the Arts magnet high school in New Haven since the ‘90s. The ECA Arts Hall is where, this Sunday afternoon, you can hear a mammoth triple feature of scripts which won CHP’s second annual Connecticut Stories on Stage playwriting competition.

The April 17 show, which starts at 2 p.m., features staged readings of the judges’ top choices from the three Stories on Stage categories: Full-length play, One-Act Play and Ten-Minute Play.

The full-length, Rosary Peas by Michael Burgan of West Haven, is set in South Glastonbury and according to a press release “focuses on the intergenerational relationships in a family in the midst of changes and on the difficulties a family experiences living with a grandparent suffering from dementia.”  CHP happens to have a history of doing theater events which draw attention to problems associated with mental, including ongoing collaborations with the Free at Last Players, so this seems like an ideal match of script and producer. The cast includes Bunni Barresi, Henry Ayres-Brown, James Luse (another ECA instructor, and a former lecturer at Yale Theater Studies), Carolyn Kirsch, Carolyn Ladd and Ingrid Schaeffer (head of the ECA theater department).

The one-act is by a guy I’ve known for years—Stratford playwright Bill McGovern, who used to be part of a playreading gang I ran which met weekly at Rudy’s Bar & Grill for most of the 1990s. Bill’s play Sunset is billed as being “about an impulse unique to aging: the need to validate one’s existence.  The play focuses on the unlikely alliance of Margaret, a professional and Angie, a pushy rover and the strategies they invent to camouflage their isolation.” Sunset’s “set in various locations in contemporary southern Connecticut.” The cast includes the aforementioned Barresi, Kirsch and Luse.

Playwright Elizabeth Appel writes that her 10-minute drama Drugs, War and Nine, which concludes the marathon, was “inspired by photos of May Day 1970 by John Hill and Tom Strong (and being there).” The CHP press release elucidates that Drugs, War and Nine is set “in a facility in New Haven.  When the staff tries to help a resident confront the truth about his participation in the Viet Nam War and other events, a debate erupts about the 1970 May Day Rally and the “New Haven Nine.” CHP honcho Peter Loffredo is part of the cast for this one, alongside Javis Arnold and Carolyn Ladd.

Do I have to spell out how cool it is that a small theater company is not just furthering the creation and presentation of new works, but new local works, about local issues? For reservations, call (860) 347-7771. Tix are $10 for adults, $5 students and seniors. The ECA Arts Hall is at 55 Audubon Street (the entrance is on Orange Street end of the building), New Haven.

A week before the beginning of his second full season as artistic director of the Westport country playhouse, does Mark Lamos feel back in the swing of things, or did his programming instincts never leave him?

Lamos returned to the art-dir racket in early 2009 after nearly a decade as a freelance director of plays and operas around the country (including a couple of shows at Yale Rep). Before that, of course, he programmed 17 seasons as artistic director of Hartford Stage.

In his freelance years, was it hard to stop thinking in terms of longterm planning, of balanced seasons, of which shows would follow which, of where in a season he’d insert himself as a director?

“No!,” he laughs, in a phone chat from his home Wednesday morning. “I kind of reveled in it. I liked not thinking about the whole season. I was working on

projects more on their own. I was not thinking about institutional needs. I didn’t read reviews. I didn’t have to fundraise. I never thought about putting together a season.”

Pretty impressive turnaround, then, considering how beautifully calibrated the impending Westport season seems to be. First up is a smart New York comedy which has a certain neurotic appeal for baby boomers: Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy. John Rando (Urinetown; The Toxix Avenger Musical) had originally been announced to direct this mental mirthquake, but had to bow out “barely two months before the first rehearsal,” Lamos relates. “We had the designers and designs in place. I was busy doing something off Broadway. But we got our little team together and made a list of 25 or 30 directors we could ask. Of those, four were available. Some were very exciting to think about, but then we looked at ourselves.”

Associate Artistic Director David Kennedy, who directed Donald Margulies’ seriocomic Dinner With Friends for Westport last year, hardly hesitated, Lamos says, when asked if he wanted to take a crack at it. Which did wonders for morale: “The staff were all so happy that David was riding to the rescue.”

Moreover, “David’ s vision is optimistic in helping me to shape the season,” Lamos says. “He is wonderfully talented, so perceptive.”

Kennedy (a Yale school of drama grad who oversaw a spectacular Yale summer cabaret season in 1998) now has two directorial duties during the March-to- December season: Beyond Therapy right now and a much darker psychological spellbinder, Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, appropriately scheduled for late summer, Aug. 23 through Sept. 10.

Lamos is a double dipper as a director himself, doing Terrence McNally’s Lips Together Teeth Apart July 12-30 and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Oct. 11 through Nov. 5.

I mentioned to Lamos that the McNally choice reminded me in some ways of Longtime Companion, the award-winning  film (scripted by Craig Lucas) in which he acted, playing the soap opera writer whose AIDS illness inspires Bruce Davison’s famous “Let it go” monologue). Like that film, McNally’s play takes place on Fire Island and concerns the death of a gay man due to AIDS– but Lips Together does so from a “straighter” perspective. “I’m blown away by it,” Lamos says. “I had kind of taken it for granted. I never saw it, but I read it during my penultimate season in Hartford. We were going to do it [at Westport] last year, but the rights were quashed. (The roundabout theater announced, but ultimately canceled, a major New York revival of the play which was to star Patton Oswalt.)

As for the Shakespeare, Westport may be the only regional theater where doing one of the bard’s best-known comedies—Twelfth Night, Oct. 11 through Nov. 5 raises eyebrows. “It’s only the third Shakespeare [Westport] has done in 80 years,” says Lamos, whose own reputation is partly based on his great affinity for the playwright. (Examples: Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage in the early ’90s, with Calista Flockhart as Juliet and Bill Camp as Mercutio, and an all- male cast romping through Taming of the Shrew at Yale rep in 2003). “I don’t think I’m telling takes out of school, but when I announced the season to a small group of donors and I got to twelfth night, I was expecting this purring of happy sighs. Instead, a couple of people said ‘You really think we can pull off a Shakespeare here? Do you think people will come to it?’ like it was radical programming.”

The one other show on the 2011 slate has a different director—Nicholas Martin, former artistic director of the Williamstown Theater Festival and Boston’s Huntington Theater—but is that resonates with both Lamos and the Westport Country Playhouse. The Circle, a 1921 hit by W. Somerset Maugham (one of those writers whose extraordinary popularity throughout most of the 20^th century can’t be squared with how seldom his work is revived in the 21^st) fits right in with a lot of smart British comedies that have strutted primly across the Westport stage. “The theater had a tradition of doing Ayckbourn and other British playwrights before I got there,” Lamos notes. Maugham’s biggest successes—the novels Of Human Bondage (1915) and The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and the Broadway hit The Letter (1926) among them—may have already been behind him when Westport Country Playhouse opened in 1931, but his name pops up there regularly throughout the years: John Colton and Clemence Randolph’s stage adaptation of Maugham short story Rain in 1938; A Foreign Language, based on his novel Jane in 1951, and two important productions of his 1926 hit The Constant Wife: in 1938 starring Ethel Barrymore, and in 2000 directed by Joanne Woodward when she was first beginning her noble efforts to restore the theater’s fortunes and legacy.

It was elsewhere, though, that Lamos first got wrapped up in The Circle. He had a chance to direct it himself for San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre in 2006. “I didn’t know the play. I loved working on it. And when I came to Westport, I knew it would be right for this theater, whether or not I’d be directing it.”

Is there any major ingredient missing from this well-balanced Westport season? Well, yes, and Lamos is already on it for the season after this one. “My day began today at 5:30 a.m. with a pile of brand new plays. There may be a world premiere, or at least a very new play, in 2012.”

For more info on the Westport season, and current subscription deals (like the LGBT Night Out series, which comes with pre-show cocktail parties), circle around to the WCP website.

Musical Chairs—An Evening of Short Plays and Music

Through April 14 at Lyric Hall, 827 Whalley Ave., New Haven.

Plays: “In a Manner of Speaking” by Robin Rothstein, directed by Keely Knudsen, performed by Rebecka Jones and Aleta Staton; “Seeing the Light” by Robert McKay, directed by Jeff Stanley, performed by Kelly DiMauro, George Kulp and Janie Tamarkin; “After You” by Steven Dietz, directed by Janie Tamarkin, performed by Rebecka Jones and George Kulp; and “Lost” by Mary Louise Wilson, directed by Jeff Stanley, performed by Aleta Staton and Janie Tamarkin.

Songs performed by the Pierce Campbell jazz duo: “Sunny Side of the Street” (with Keely Knudsen), “Secret Agent Man,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” (with Keely Knudsen),  and “Blackbird” (with Keely Knudsen).

Musical Chairs brings the party, and a casual low-key soiree with bowls of chips at the cabaret tables. This is a tidy and neat small company, now several years old, that works sweetly and efficiently, delivering one-acts as cordially and professionally as if they were waiters bringing you fancy entrees.

Showcases of short plays by composed, confident performers who’d ganged together for extra oomph used to be such a mainstay of the local theatergoing experience that I’ve forgotten how much I’ve missed this once inescapable format. Musical chairs has a cabaret theater-crispness: brisk contemporary one-acts by writers well-known (Steven Dietz, whose full-length Private Eyes was produced by Theatre 4 last year and whose “After You” is perhaps the darkest and most intimate piece on this bill), lesser-known (Robin Rothstein, who rails against the “’As It Were’ People” in a burst of semantic silliness titled “In a Manner of Speaking”), of a familiar style (Robert McKay, who with “Seeing the Light” has mastered the Actors Theatre of Louisville ten-minute play format in which a single static prop becomes the focal point of conversational hijinks) and a writer better known for other pursuits (the esteemed comic actress Mary Louis Wilson, whose delightfully dithering and uplifting “Lost” could be said to have things in common with her ephemeral acting in Grey Gardens).

The last show I saw in the beautifully renovated Lyric Hall space, a magical space that should prove to be a real boon to the small theater community, was A Broken Umbrella’s haunting Halloweentime Westville murder chronicle VaudeVillain. That show was distinguished by its large cast and lush costumes and sets. Musical Chairs uses economy and sparseness to equally remarkable effect in the same venue.

The entire five-person Theatre 4 cast is shown to good advantage here, including company co-founders Janie Tamarkin (a perky performer who appears in “Seeing the Light” and “Lost” and directs Dietz’ “After You”) and Rebecka Jones (whose laser-eyed focus makes her expressions of annoyance “In a Manner of Speaking” and bruised feelings in “After You” palpable).

One of my favorite local actresses, Aleta Staton, could steal moments right away from Tamarkin in “Lost” (in which a couple of women continually forget things, resulting in a literally upsetting spiritual conclusion) and Jones in “In a Manner of Speaking” if she chose to, but Staton’s great gift is to be such a generous in-the-moment ensemble player. She doesn’t grandstand even when she’d be forgiven.

Likewise, George Kulp (a key player in the New Haven Theatre Company production of Mamet’s Glengarry Glenn Ross last year, some other company members of which are indulging in Picasso at the Lapin Agile downtown this weekend) can do the big blustery blowhard thing magnificently, but knows how to tamp down his temper for this more intimate room. Kelly DiMauro plays off Kulp well in the alarmist “Seeing the Light.”

The Pierce Campbell Jazz Duo (whose other member is stand-up bassist Tony Pasqualoni) provides the transitions from play to play, often joined by vocalist Keely Knudsen (a Theatre 4 co-founder who also directs the Rothstein piece here). Keeping it live and low-key, and not resorting to piped-in pre-show and between-scene music turns out to be the secret weapon that gives Musical Chairs a fluid, comfortable, out-with-friends amiability. I’ve long been familiar with Pierce Campbell from his solo acoustic folk stuff, his old Irish duo and occasional cover acts, but his “jazz” side is new to me—basically he’s a well-rounded guitarist with a soothing voice. He also did pre-show patter. The idea of a theater event with a houseband is rather appealing, and truly enhances the mood of Musical Chairs.

Theatre 4 (whose other founder, Mariah Sage, does not appear in this outing) is a company that’s going the extra distance to make sure that audiences are relaxed and entertained. So much contemporary small theater arranges purposeful discomfort, confrontation and shock that to be hit with something so pleasant and pacifying is a welcome relief from midweek madness.

Musical Chairs has its final performance tonight (Thursday the 14^th of April, 2011). Theatre 4 has typically done one or two shows a year, full-length works in Autumn and comparatively lighter efforts in springtime. Company members told me that they hope to step up the pace and put up shows more often. (Venues like Lyric Hall can only fuel that desire.) There’s other Theatre 4 stuff planned for 2011, and the company has commissioned playwright George Brant to write a new full-length play to be staged in 2012.

Meantime, a few rounds of musical chairs can be most satisfying.

Closed. April 9 at the Long Wharf Theatre mainstage. Directed by Maryna Harrison. Musical Director/Technical Director/Production Manager: Lydia Pustell. Set/Props: Katrina Frances. Costumes: Caitlin Headley. Lighting: Samuel Hewett. Sound: Nicole Rheaume. Stage manager: Alex Hajjar. Dramaturg: Mallory Morris. Graphics: Claire Zoghb. Music advisor: Carol Taubl. Performed by Sam Taubl (First Kid), Rick Bean (Uncle Celery), Jesse Gabbard (Tiger 1), Jenna Lex (Second Kid), Matt Cornish (Homeless Man, Oppenheimer, Moon Rock), Nicole Rodriguez (Tiger 2) and Taneisha Duggan (Tiger 3).

For years now, The Long Wharf Theatre has been turning its interns, associates and valued behind-the-scenesters loose on special annual projects, typically cast with New Haven community talent. The participants tend to be young adults, so the shows have the feel of better-than-average college student shows (and I speak, as my faithful readers will now, as an avid fan of collegiate theater).

In recent seasons this project, dubbed Next Stage, has skewed even younger, at least in the audience, offering family-friendly fare and even busing in school groups on weekdays. Last year LWT associate artistic director Eric Ting directed a fresh adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince. This year’s Next Stage (which played a mere two public performances last Saturday, plus a couple of school group gigs earlier in the week) was tigertigertiger, the only children’s theater piece thus far written by prolific alt-theater icon Mac Wellman.

Children’s theater is so often done on the fly (again, I’m not a snob about that, but as with all theater, practicality and second-guessing the audiences’ expectations can skew artists’ best intentions) that seeing a fully designed and diligently rehearsed piece like this was a treat. For one thing, Tigertigertiger is practically an oratorio, with a complex harmonic vocal score by Michael Roth, the eclectic composer of several dozen theater scores (particularly for the La Jolla Playhouse) and the orchestrator/arranger for several Randy Newman projects. Scenic designer Katrina Frances (who works in the LWT props shop and directed a Mac Wellman play herself while a student at UMass Amherst) concocted a set with a wide, high-up stage area accessible by a winding staircase half a dozen platform-sized steps. You’d think that with the complicated musical and stage arrangements, the cast might have clung to the central set, but director Maryna Harrison had them whisking into all corners of the theater, into the audience, up and down the voms and at the mezzanine railings.

Well, they do call it Next Stage. More importantly, this was a play about an odyssey, and the peripatetic staging made it feel like one. Yes, this was a thoughtful and careful production. The only weak link? Surprisingly, the script. Mac Wellman’s writing is usually so concise, so prepared, that it’s a shock to see not only a script of his that requires a cast of seven (large for just about any theater genre these days) but seems so unwieldy in length and scope. I saw more than a few kids’ eyes glaze over. The real issue is not the hour-plus running time but too many fresh starts and abrupt changes in the scenes, so that you really don’t see an end in sight. When the piece—about conquering one’s fears, knowing one’s self and respecting others, among other common kids-show insights—finally ends, it’s with this over-their-heads climactic confession: “It was a Freudian slip!”

But disappointment with the script, from the guy who wrote what I think is one of the greatest plays of the late 20^th century (Sincerity Forever) and a bunch of other cool cutting-edge stuff, should not diminish the success of the Next Stage cast and creative team. Like last year’s The Happy Prince, this was a lush, full-blown ensemble experience, as inspiring and uplifting to its young audiences as it must have been to the Next Stage company’s Long Wharf colleagues.

Last Friday I saw New Haven Theatre Co. romp through Steve Martin’s intellectually silly Picasso at the Lapin Agile. On Sunday I went to Yale’s Peabody Museum with my daughters to see the high-tech multi-media Black Hole exhibit there. This was the umpteenth time I’d entered the Black Hole, but the first time I’d really heard Albert Einstein speak there. A voice purporting to be the great scientist’s leads you through an exercise in measuring the relativity of time and weight in black holes (though that term was not yet being used in Einstein’s day).
My father was British and my mother’s family was Austrian, so I may be overly sensitive to how some actors mangle European accents. Still, whoever recorded the bit for the museum exhibit really overdoes it, seemingly taking cues from Walter Matthau’s uberdotty interterpretation of Einstein in the Marshall Brickman movie I.Q. You know, lots of chirpiness and “Ja?”s.

Gave me even more respect for Jeremy Funke’s rather even-tempered, if properly comical, voicing of old Al in the NHTC show, not to mention Mark Nelson in the first national tour.
Next stage up after Picasso at the Lapin Agile for aspiring Einstein impersonators: Terry Johnson’s timeless tragicomedy Insignificance, which has its parodic qualities (besides Einstein, it conjures up caricatures of Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe and Joseph McCarthy) but requires depth and suspenseful pacing.

Broadway’s Born Yesterday revival is directed by Doug Hughes, who directed nothing remotely like it during the five years that he was Artistic Director of the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven. Even on Broadway, he’s better know for dramas (Wit, Doubt, Frozen, Oleanna, and even a few plays with more than one word in their titles) than comedies, though he’s been making inroads into funnier stuff with The Royal Family in 2009 and Elling (based on Ingvar Ambjornsen’s comic Norwegian novels) last year.

Born Yesterday is always a showcase for the actress playing Billie Dawn—this time it’s Nina Arianda—but I think Hughes’ ace in the hole here may be Jim Belushi. Yes, I know… but his gifts as a live performer, I happily will argue, eclipse his insipid sitcom self. Belushi was known as the Bernie Litko to beat when he co-starred in the hit Apollo Theatre production of David Mamet’s breakthrough work Sexual Perversity in Chicago in the late 1970s. (He reprised the role in the much-mangled film version, About Last Night…, and though the whole play is tamed into a shadow of its angry self, you can still sense the spark Belushi must have brought to it onstage.) I saw Jim Belushi as the Pirate King in the first national tour of Joseph Papp’s pop revision of The Pirates of Penzance; since the star of the Broadway produiction had been the much differently voiced and shaped Kevin Kline, Belushi got to make the role his own, and unleashed a swashbuckling physicality few suspected he had, and which he rarely used again until joining his brother John’s old band The Blues Brothers a couple decades later. Smart casting to make him a gangster/businessman.

As I exhaustively mused-upon in an earlier post, the Yale Rep announced its 2011 season back on March 10, on the early side for regional theaters these days.

The Long Wharf Theatre’s season announcement, which I was told was close to finalized last month (it came up in relation to which business was finished or unfinished when Managing Director Ray Cullom tendered his resignation in the first week of March) won’t come until May 9.

Two big reasons why:

1. There’ll be fanfare: a “season announcement event” with performances, a Founders Award ceremony and a reception.
2. They can afford to wait. I’m told that subscription renewals (known as “blind” renewals, since subscribers are reupping happily without even knowing what next season’s shows will be) are so strong that there’s no urgent incentive to announce until they feel like it. Nice feeling, huh? LWT spokesguy Steve Scarpa says the theater sees this encouraging response as a real expression of support for the theater’s programming and its importance in the community: “The response has been fantastic. It’s heartening that people know and trust and like what we do.”

Still, announce already! We’re biting our nails in anticipation.

The current Long Wharf season is in its final weeks. The theater’s Next Stage (i.e. interns and emerging backstage talent) production of Mac Wellman’s family-friendly soul-searching expedition tigertigertiger plays this Saturday, April 9, at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. The 2010-11 mainstage subscription season concludes with Italian American Reconciliation, April 27-May 22. The season-ending gala (unrelated to the season-announcement bash mentioned above) will be June 3 and feature The Midtown Men, the vocal group made up of original cast members of Jersey Boys.

Remaining performances April 10 at 7 p.m. and April 9, 14, 15 & 16 at 8 p.m. at 118 Court St., New Haven.

By Steve Martin. Produced by New Haven Theatre Co. Directed by Hilary Brown. Performed by Steve Scarpa (Freddy), John Watson (Gaston), Hallie Martensen (Germaine), Jeremy Funke (Einstein), Megan Chenot (Suzanne, Countess, Admirer), J. Kevin Smith (Sagot), Peter Chenot (Pablo), Erich Greene (Schmendiman, April 8-10 perfs.), Christian Shaboo (Schendiman, April 14-16), Michael Smith (Visitor).

Man walks into a bar. He’s mulling the defining physical theory of the universe. Painter gets drawn in too. He’s Picasso, damn it! Then a mysterious jumpsuited sneering man from the future materializes, and all heaven breaks loose.

It’s not like it never comes around, but somehow I haven’t seen (or read) Picasso in the Lapin Agile since its first national tour back in 1997. That production featured Paul Provenza (currently a cultural hero of mine for his counterculture comedian-interview compendium Satiristas!) and Mark Nelson (one of the treasures of the New York and regional stage, known at New Haven’s Long Wharf for everything from Arms and the Man to Underneath the Lintel to A Doll’s House) and played the Stamford Center for the Arts’ Rich Forum—which, while a cool venue, rarely got first national tours of ANYTHING. It was odd enough, even 14 years ago, to see straight plays get major tours; the Steve Martin imprimatur definitely helped. The production, I remember, had a lush set, a sound design that made some of the gags especially loud and fierce, and unexpected special effects spectacle.

Which may be what one does when one wants to puff up a play to earn a slot on a “Best of Broadway” subscription series made this short, frenzied. But is it really required? Picasso in the Lapin Agile has had its fancy productions at regional theaters since, but I like the human scale it’s found in this community-based rendition by the New Haven Theater Company, at a temporarily fixed-up storefront at 118 Court Street (a block behind City Hall).

NHTC has a core group of players who have worked out regularly in improv revues. They, and whipsmart director Hilary Brown, understand that the incessant art-history jokes and frequent fourth-wall-breaking digressions in the script only work if they’re raced through fast enough that you laugh in recognition or in surprise but aren’t allowed to ponder too long.

This is not a slow-burn, reaction-shot-after-every-riposte kind of show. This is all-right-what-happens-next? kind of show. The cast gets right on with it. The script never really settles—like Martin’s ‘80s stand-up and early films, it’s more concerned with comedy timing than character development. The play ostensibly treads the same turf as Tom Stoppard’s brilliant Travesties, asking what it must have been like to be physically present at the birth of what we know now to have been an historic new era. In Travesties, a dull diplomat interacts with Vladmir Lenin, James Joyce and Tristin Tzara in WWI-time Switzerland. In Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a bartender, his girlfriend and a regular customer with a bladder problem interact with Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein and a hip-wiggling visitor from the future.

Martin hones some thoughtful dialogue about the creative process, the cultural incentives of becoming an artist, the unique thought process of physicists, and the vicissitudes of immortal fame. But these insights are not allowed to take root, or to distract from the constant zaniness. Picasso at the Lapin Agile is way too conscious of being a play to let any humanity grow within its colorful set. Actors comment on which order they appear in the printed program, ask forgiveness for the cheap exit lines they use in order to leave the stage and further the plot, and otherwise inform us continuously that they are actors in a play. Which helps steer you towards what this play really is—a comic discursion on form and content, on reality and artifice, on history and humdrum, which questions its own foundations and validity at the same time it examines the worth and relevance and timelessness of some of the best known people in the 20th century.

The jokes are fast and furious and often precious, and the NHTC cast understands that they shouldn’t act too smart and shouldn’t ever slow down. You can’t call the results exactly even, in a stylistic sense—these are individuals of varying talents fighting for attention, and that’s pretty much what the script is about—but to director Brown’s immense credit, nobody gets left behind in the daffy dust kicked up by principle performers Jeremy Funke as Albert Einstein (who paces deliciously), Peter Chenot as Picasso (who has the rare, and in this case crucial, ability to smolder and seem silly at the same time) and Steve Scarpa (the blowhard bartender who both sets the show’s raucous rat-a-tat pace and has to interrupt it most often with “it’s only a play” gags). There are lots of jokes at the expense of women (one of the reasons why a high school production of this play in Oregon was challenged a few years ago), but Hallie Martenson (as the bartender’s girlfriend) and Megan Chenot (as a Picasso groupie and several other flighty female presences) give as good as they get. It’s also nice to see veteran local small theater talent such as John Watson and J. Kevin Smith grab hold of great supporting roles and add to the general mirth.

The bluster is constant, and at its height the show feels like a spirited improv comedy competition held in a college Humanities class. Which is what community-based theater often means in a city such as New Haven. Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a great choice with which to continue rebuilding the fortunes of New Haven Theatre Co., which has been around for something like 15 years under several distinct managements. (I directed a show for the company myself over a decade ago.) A smart yet brassy comedy that brings the crowd into the fun is an art you don’t have to argue about. If you do choose to unwind and discuss the show afterwards, here’s one more cool community-building aspect: the Olde School Saloon and Bistro a block away at 418 State St. has created a Lapin Agile cocktail (supposedly laced with absinthe) in the show’s honor, and brandishing your theater program at the bar will get you half-price drink.