Steve MARTIN has had more than 25 years to contemplate the nature of fame, and he has a few favorite tales of his own.
"I had a hat and sunglasses on," he says, "which is what I always wear. I'm not trying to disguise myself." Indeed, Martin had just entered the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel lobby for a series of meetings wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses. "A guy passed by and said ..." -- Martin leans low to whisper in a conspiratorial accent -- " 'Enjoy your anonymity.' Then the guy walked on into the park."
The very famous comic laughs happily, delighted by the ironies. "That's my favorite!" But some moments are less lighthearted. Last week, Martin went to see rehearsals for "The Underpants," which opens at the Geffen Playhouse on Wednesday. It has been more than two years since Martin last saw his adaptation of German playwright Carl Sternheim's obscure 1911 satire, and he had forgotten its climactic moment. Watching it, he felt, was suddenly "chilling." In the Peninsula hotel, Martin now repeats his heroine's words, employing a veteran actor's character-driven empathy: "Something leaves me surprisingly empty...." Pause. "My fame is gone."
In the age of Paris Hilton and reality TV, are there more chillingly silly words to be uttered? Since he wrote "The Underpants" for the Classic Stage Company in New York in 2002, Martin has been working, doing stuff few famous people do: hosting the 75th annual Academy Awards; adapting and acting in a film version of his best-selling novella "Shopgirl" to be released this fall); writing a second novel, "The Pleasure of My Company"; starring in "Cheaper by the Dozen" and "Bringing Down the House"; and writing "The Pink Panther," a prequel to the popular series and the first to star Martin as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. For such an artist, work is integral to fame.
When the Classic Stage's then-artistic director Barry Edelstein invited him to try adapting a play he'd never heard of, Martin simply said, "I like the title." He then proceeded to take what was essentially a political and marital farce and turn it into an exploration of the vagaries of fame. The premise remains that of the original: In 1910 Dusseldorf, Germany, during a full-dress military parade, the wife of a petty state bureaucrat drops her underpants as the kaiser rides by. Was it an accident? Or was it a Freudian slip by a sex-starved, neglected, bored housewife? Public scandal leads to notoriety, which leads to a brief flirtation with potential seducers who glimpsed her private parts, which leads to 15 minutes of dubious fame before the housewife is abruptly discarded back into grim obscurity.
