Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Pablo Picasso walk into a bar. Stein says to Picasso -- no, wait, that's not right. Ron Hirsen's The Frugal Repast, a play with Picasso's etching of the same title at its center, is meant to be a debate on the value of art, not the intellectual's equivalent of a priest-and-a-rabbi joke. However, the jocular way the characters speak and interact -- never really saying much, their names repeated as if stuck in a continuous joke setup -- manages to color any pretensions to the high-minded discussion of art.
Harold Todd and Dawn Luebbe play the aerialists depicted in Picasso's first edition of prints of The Frugal Repast, which continue to command exorbitantly high prices at auction. When they see their images hanging in a gallery window, they decide to steal a print and ask for a ransom of a thousand francs. When Ambroise Vollard (David Wohl), the gallery owner at the center of the Parisian art world in the early 20th century, discovers the print's disappearance, he simply replaces it with another and returns to his table, where Stein (Lizbeth Mackay), Apollinaire (Frank Liotti), and Alice B. Toklas (Julie Boyd) are perpetually dining on curried chicken. Whenever Picasso (Roberto DeFelice) arrives with a new consort (all played comically by Kathleen McElfresh with different accents and costumes), each is reintroduced as if it's an in-joke that should have the audience rolling in the aisles.
Perhaps the comic elements wouldn't be so cloying if it weren't for the constant and unneeded set changes. Instead of being kept downstage, the dining table is constantly struck and returned, slowing down whatever momentum is built up. Although Todd and Luebbe are painfully awkward, their physicality does capture the gawky elbows and angles of the etching's original subjects, and Mackay embodies a thoroughly dour Stein. But overall, the historic personages are played as fools rather than the movers and shapers of an era.
Presented by and at Abingdon Theatre Company, 312 W. 36th St., NYC. Feb. 7-25; Tue.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.