Barry Edelstein and Scott Pask

SEASON PREVIEW CONVERSATIONS

Famous for all the Wrong Reasons
Classic Stage Company artistic director Barry Edelstein commissioned Steve Martin to write a new version of Carl Sternheim’s 1910 farce The Underpants. Edelstein will direct the premiere in Classic Stage’s 2002 season, on a set designed by Scott Pask. The rarely glimpsed play chronicles the life-changing events that befall a woman whose underpants fall down in public, her neglectful husband and the four men who desire her.

Barry Edelstein: The Underpants is one of those plays on every artistic director’s list: classic, comedy, one set, six characters. But no one ever does it. That’s because the existing English translations don’t quite make the case for what a hoot the play is. Martin’s version is fresh, funny and naughty in just the right way—and it totally preserves the spirit of the original.

Scott Pask: The world of the play has a silly “slamming door farce” side, but it also has to be grounded in the reality of the period, Berlin in 1910, as well as the psychological reality of some people who are pretty desperate for love. As funny as it is, it’s also a very poignant story of how one handles a fleeting moment of fame after a lifetime of obscurity.

Edelstein: So much of the production is about making a place where the machinery of the comedy can work—surprise entrances, broad physical gags and people spying on one another. But then there’s this dark, mysterious danger lurking beneath the surface. Sea serpents under placid lakes, sexual secrets under complicated period clothes.

Pask: The unsettling feeling that this place could host a catastrophe as easily as a farce has to be there. I’m reminded of an architect, Bernard Tschumi, who won the competition to design the gardens at Parc de la Villette in Paris. The gardens are an incredible network of abstracted folies, laid out in a rigorous pattern throughout the park. A great combination: almost whimsical patterns but governed by a kind of repressive formality. They’re absurd, but somehow also serious. That’s the play.

Edelstein: I keep imagining this room just floating in the air in the middle of the theatre. It could crash down at any minute, or it could just hang there—the oddest apartment in Berlin.

Pask:It would be fun to give the production that kind of idea. Eccentric walls or something. Really let the sweep of Classic Stage’s space, which has such an epic quality, find its way into the foundation of this little bourgeois flat.

Edelstein: That’s great. Big ideas in a tiny space. It’s like Cohen, this sickly little barber in the play who’s maniacally obsessed with Wagner. The Ring blaring away inside the head of some nebbish. Lohengrin played on the accordion.

Pask: Heroic ideas in a silly room.

Edelstein: Can you put that in the model?

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