PICASSO ON STAGE, NOT IN GALLERY

Among the many things for which Pablo Picasso is noted--genius aside--is the astounding variety and volume of his work. He produced more than 20,000 paintings, drawings, engravings, collages, sculptures and pieces of pottery. He also wrote two one-act plays, a fact you won’t see in many reference books. It took a theater student from Cleveland to find that out and, after seven years of trying, to arrange for them to be shown here. They will be performed at the Sixth Avenue Playhouse downtown beginning Thursday.

Robert Black, 26, of San Diego obtained the rights to English translations of “Desire Caught by the Tail” and “Four Little Girls” in May from a British holding company. “Desire” has been performed at least twice in Los Angeles in the ‘70s and had a reading in 1982 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York--which Black attended. In Picasso’s lifetime, the work had a reading in front of some of his friends, including Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir.

Black first heard about the plays from one of his professors at Oberlin College who had discovered them during a research trip to France. Black wrote away for the rights to the British translations, but did not get a response until last year.

When he finally received the letter saying that he could buy the rights, he was directing another play in Los Angeles. At the first opportunity, he flew to New York to get whatever information he could on the plays.

“I spent an hour at the Lincoln Center Library and that’s all I needed to find everything they had, which wasn’t much,” he said. Then, he went to the enormous main branch of the New York City Public Library and had a bit more success. “I did find manuscripts that had some drawings in the margins . . . Some of the tableaux and designs in the plays are based on those pictures.”

Black found one picture Picasso drew of five doors with feet coming out from beneath them. He built five eight-foot doors and directed actors to hold and shake them.

Other than using Picasso’s designs as a guide, Black said, he has taken some license to make the plays more understandable to modern audiences. Rather than recreate stage directions, bringing on winged horses, eagles and golden globes as the English company did, Black is having many of Picasso’s stage directions narrated. He has also inserted many of his own ideas and symbols.

“Picasso once said, ‘My paintings are sums of destructions.’ He starts with an idea, pulls it apart and puts it back together again. That’s what we’ve done with the plays, too. We’ve ripped them all apart. Especially in the “Four Little Girls” where the language is more difficult. We’ve tried to find a structure in which it all makes sense.”

When Black returned from New York, he was still anxious to find out more about the plays. He knew that Francoise Gilot, who had participated in the reading of “Desire” at the Guggenheim, was now married to Jonas Salk and living in La Jolla. Gilot lived with Picasso from 1946-1953 and is the mother of his children Paloma and Claude. Eventually, Black was able to meet with Gilot to discuss the works and gain some perspective about the time in which they were written.

The earlier play, “Desire Caught by the Tail,” predates Picasso’s liaison with Gilot. It was written in 1941 during the German occupation of France, at a time when Picasso was forbidden to exhibit his work. Before the war, Picasso had been financially as well as critically successful, but during the occupation he suffered a deprivation he had not known since his bohemian days in Paris 20 years before. His paintings at this time became harsher and his faces more distorted as in his “Seated Women” of 1937-1941 and his long, ghostly nude of 1940, “Woman Dressing Her Hair.”

“ ‘Desire’ is a little easier to follow in a traditional sense (than “Four Little Girls”),” Black said. “The players are trying to fill out all their desires for food, warmth and shelter but are somehow stopped . . . thwarted by the world and the powers that be.”

“Desire” is a 50-minute play written in six acts, while “Four Little Girls” is a 50-minute play broken down into nine. “Four Little Girls,” written in 1946, the year Picasso met Gilot, coincides with some of Picasso’s happiest paintings, such as “Femme-fleur” and “La Joie de Vivre,” a pastoral scene which features the fauns, centaurs, pipe players and nymphs that were popular with Picasso at that time.

Black said that many times in the course of this project, he has felt like one of the characters in “Desire,” trying to fulfill his dream of producing the plays but being “thwarted by the powers that be.”

First there was the problem of losing his male lead for “Four Little Girls” to a film less than a month ago. He was all set to fill in himself before he found a replacement.

Then he lost his original theater, the Theatre in Old Town, due to what he says was a change in management. When he switched to the Sixth Avenue Playhouse, he had to scrap much of the old scenery and start fresh, which aggravated still another problem: money.

“I was speaking with a guy who used to be a producer of New York City opera. He said, ‘This is insane. You shouldn’t even be looking for a theater until you’ve got the money’ . . . (But, the feeling is) you . . . made a commitment and you’re just going to fight and you’re going to do it.”

And it seems he has. The plays, a dream seven years in the making, are finally here. When this run is over, though, the show will still go on. Chicago is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Picasso’s largest sculpture, which is displayed at the Daly Center, in August. Black and his plays will be there.

Afterward he will return to San Diego, where he has already started on his next project.

Black has recently discovered--and obtained the rights to--two short plays by Henri Rousseau.

The Picasso plays will be performed at the Sixth Avenue Playhouse Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. through Feb. 21.