Exposing more than ‘Underpants’

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.

At least that’s how Sternheim’s original satire of adultery concluded. However, Martin invented scenes, changed the ending and “modernized” the story. It is his own words, not Sternheim’s, that sent a chill through the visiting playwright during the rehearsal.

“She was briefly the center of attention,” Martin says with lingering traces of sorrow for his middle-class heroine. “I think about people who had momentary fame for a couple of years and then it’s gone -- people in reality TV or a one-hit wonder in the music industry. Child actors have to deal with it a lot. They grow older, they’re not on a sitcom anymore ... or when events thrust people into fame....”

He pulls another story from his personal narrative file. “During the O.J. Simpson [case],” he remembers, “I was in Europe, so I missed a lot of the details of what was going on. I happened to see the car chase [on TV] and that was about it. Weeks later, I came back to L.A. I was at a little lunch restaurant on Melrose, and a guy came up to my table, stuck out his hand, and said, ‘Steve. Kato.’ I didn’t know who he was. His fame was kind of accidental, or tangential, and that’s what this play was about for me.”

But finding that meaning was difficult work for Martin at first, even with a literal translation from the German that had been commissioned by the Classic Stage Company.

“Die Hosen,” Sternheim’s first in a six-play cycle titled “Comedies from the Heroic Life of the Middle Class,” was banned by the imperial authorities and then by the Nazis. For the world premiere, which was staged by the legendary Max Reinhardt, the Berlin censor would approve its production only after the title was changed to “The Giant,” a reference to the heroics of the bombastic, egomaniacal husband whose machismo doesn’t include sexually satisfying his wife. (Later English titles include “The Unmentionables” and “A Pair of Drawers.”)

“As I read the original,” Martin remembers, “I’d realize I didn’t know what just happened. It didn’t make sense. There was an untranslatable element in the original, which was a kind of verbal byplay. Almost like winking at the audience a bit. I could never figure out what that was. I read contemporary descriptions of the play, and I could see there was something beyond me and maybe even beyond translation because it was so linked to the times. But if it doesn’t play now, you’re not doing the original playwright any service. Working on it, I asked myself: ‘Will this be a historical look at the play or will this be a modern entertainment?’ And I decided to make it a modern entertainment, using Sternheim’s themes and some of his lines.

“And then I found out as I was writing it that what it was about then was not going to work now for me as a writer. I found something else that it was about: fame. So I changed the thrust of the play from being a social commentary about the stupidity of the proletariat to sort of a discourse on momentary fame.”

A flowing undercurrent

Martin’s aesthetic decision emerged from his core preoccupations. He writes eloquently and often about the erotic obsessions of men for women. In “Shopgirl,” the novella that Martin prefers to label a “tone poem,” a middle-aged millionaire grows obsessed because, as the text reveals, “he cannot tell if the surface he glimpsed under Mirabelle’s blouse was her skin or a flesh-colored nylon underthing. He lets the symbols of sex form their own strict logic. The white blouse implies the skin, which implies the bra, which implies her breasts, which implies her neck and her hair.”

Ultimately, access provides “a unification of his self, made possible by the possession of his very opposite.” And so in Martin’s revision of “The Underpants,” an unpublished -- “and proud of it” -- poet fondles a pair of women’s undergarments, saying: “Soft. Sheer. That’s nice. Thrilling to touch, but not as thrilling as the skin beneath it.” These lines could just as easily appear in many of Martin’s original works.

But a darker element continuously disturbed Martin while he worked on the adaptation: anti-Semitism. “There are very touchy things in the play,” Martin admits, including a Jewish barber who risks his life to get close to the lady of the underpants. “So that’s delicate for a white Texan to handle. In the original play, the Holocaust really resonates because it was written prior to the horrible events. You could see it coming in the Sternheim. I had a debate with Barry Edelstein whether the author was anti-Semitic or not. I thought not. I read research that sounded like he wasn’t. He was saying this class was behaving badly toward the Jews. We never really resolved it.”

In the New York premiere, director Edelstein gave the actor portraying the German bureaucrat a Hitlerian mustache and hair. But at the Geffen, director John Rando vows to concentrate on the comic: sexual obsession as farce.

“This play would basically never get any attention in the American theater,” admits Rando, the Tony-winning director of “Urinetown.” “But Steve breathed new life into a production that would otherwise be forgotten. “Besides, the term ‘German farce’ is an oxymoron except in Martin’s hands.”

“The Underpants” is scheduled to close the first decade of the Geffen Playhouse as the venerable Westwood theater goes dark for more than a year during renovation. Producing director Gilbert Cates selected the play in part because Martin’s comedy “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” opened the Geffen 10 years ago. But it’s not simple symmetry that brings “The Underpants” to L.A.

When this adaptation opened in New York, some critics accused Martin of inflating an irrelevant incident that may have been shocking -- “a glimpse of stocking” -- in a previous era, but is minor to the point of tedium today. Along came Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl, giving us the scandal of “Nipplegate.” A glimpse of a female breast, exposed “accidentally” or not during a national event, ignited a political firestorm -- just like “The Underpants.”

“At least with Jackson, there was talent involved. Today you can become famous for photographing yourself having sex,” Martin adds, but this was hardly true a mere four years ago when Classic Stage’s Edelstein initially proposed “The Underpants” to Martin. Have the times caught up with Martin’s vision until he’s neither wild nor crazy but a comic realist holding a mirror up to our notoriety-obsessed society?

Whatever he may be, Steve Martin is definitely famous. Even in the chic Peninsula lobby crowded with Hollywood insiders, industry professionals pause to stare at Martin as he rises to leave for his next meeting. He puts on his sunglasses, his baseball hat, and you can’t help it. You just have to ask: “Is fame a burden for you, Mr. Martin?”

He considers the question, then answers honestly and directly: “Depends on your mood. The benefits of fame are really fantastic, I must say. You have a right to complain, of course, but....” He smiles at a secret anecdote, then laughs. “You have a right to complain -- privately.”

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‘The Underpants’

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood

When: Opens Wednesday. Runs Tuesdays to Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.

Ends: April 25

Price: $28 to $46

Contact: (310) 208-5454