The Presentation House Theatre

Presentation House Theatre is pleased to present Jeffrey Hatcher’s A Picasso, the second offering in this year’s Third Street Series. Set in a vault below the streets of Vichy France in 1941, at a time when a society renowned for fostering artistic freedom was suddenly under the boot of a paranoid culture at it’s most oppressive, A Picasso is a fascinating, thought-provoking exploration of art and its meaning, wrapped inside a taut, smart, wartime suspense thriller.

The Nazi occupation is in full force, and so even a famous man like Picasso isn’t entirely surprised when a pair of trench-coated operatives bring him to a prison-like, windowless room for no apparent reason. Enter Miss Fischer, a German cultural official who is young and attractive, but all business. She explains to the artist that he’s been summoned because the Nazis are planning an exhibition of confiscated “decadent” art and they want to make sure that he’s included. They’ve got three small paintings that they believe are his, but they need to be authenticated.

Pablo Picasso (portrayed by award winning actor Andrew Wheeler) finds himself confronted with an odd artistic version of Sophie’s Choice: which of the three paintings will he choose to identify as he own? The route to the resolution of Picasso’s dilemma draws him and his interrogator (portrayed by Christina Schild) into a cat and mouse game of wit an intrigue. Can a work of art be political? Can it change anything? What are the links between social consciousness and genius?