If you had even the slightest worry that a play about Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein shooting the breeze in a Parisian bar might tend toward the stuffy, the appearance of absinthe and a topless woman in the first five minutes should put you right at ease. The thing was written by Steve Martin, after all.

“Picasso at the Lapin Agile” feels a little bit like “Cheers: The Intellectual, European and Historical Episode,” which is to say that the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre successfully recreates the easy fellowship of a shared drinking establishment and then populates it with a few of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.

Well, at least they hope they’re going to be - the year is 1904, Pablo Picasso (Matt Roney) is just making a name for himself, Albert Einstein (David Widmayer) is a year away from publishing his theory of relativity, and Charles Dabernow Schmendiman (Trevor Maher) has just invented an incredibly strong and brittle building material out of asbestos, kitten paws and radium. They’re hosted by a barkeep skeptical of Einstein’s overly quick accounting calculations (Adam Weakley) and a barmaid who keeps all the glasses full while reserving a pull or two off the absinthe for herself (Mouse Courtois). And then there’s Gaston (Jimmy Dee Arnold), getting my vote for best character of the whole show: a crotchety regular who comes in early and takes the seat nearest to the “toilette,” looks up from his book to dispense an occasional wisecrack and reliably steers the conversation toward the gutter.

The 90-minute, no-intermission play goes only slightly faster than real time, and if the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater was a cabaret-style venue that served cocktails, I feel certain that an audience member or two would have sidled up to join the character of his or her choice at one of the three little café tables onstage. Want to commiserate about that hot artist-type who seduced you and then blew you off a couple of weeks ago? The beautiful, redheaded and momentarily shirtless Suzanne (Heather Liebal) is your girl. Like hanging around with the well-dressed guy who gets free drinks out of the barkeep and can spin a great yarn about where to place a portrait of Jesus in the average household? That’d be Picasso’s art dealer Sagot (Mark Batell).

As drinking games go, though, I’m not sure that beer pong is any match for Einstein and Picasso speed-sketching their dreams for the 20th century on cocktail napkins. And the response - Picasso looks at Einstein’s napkin and remarks, “It’s just a formula,” to which Einstein replies, “So’s yours” - deposits us gently into the “I love you man” portion of the evening, whereupon the two geniuses begin to consider the similarities between the pursuit of art and science rather than the differences.

This, I think, is where it gets good. Martin could have written a hysterically funny play about any bunch of clowns in the bar, but he didn’t - he juxtaposed two people we know to be truly extraordinary into a situation as ordinary as last Friday night. So on the one hand, it seems to be evidence of Einstein’s brilliance when he declares in his late-evening ramble that he’s not going to change the 20th century so much as bend it, like horizons and space in general look straight when you’re in them but are really curved. On the other hand, he looks just as silly running around declaring “Light has mass!” as anyone else would, and Picasso’s “plop” sound effects as he describes the way ideas fall like rain give no foreshadowing of those ideas' effect on the coming decades of art study.

The play was written in 1993 but maybe feels even more suitable now, again standing ankle-deep in a new century and trying to fathom what’s going to shape it. Barmaid Germaine gives us a good dose of “the more things change, the more they stay the same” when she flatly declares that she won’t miss the pollution, garbage and smoke of the bad ol’ 1800s. And when she predicts that cigarettes will be banned in all restaurants by the century’s end, it doesn’t sound any more or less absurd than the barkeep’s assertion that Germany will lead the world into 100 years of peace. It takes a time-traveling visitor who arrives at the end of the show - I won’t give away his identity, but he sings songs about love and is a little touchy about anyone stepping too close to his nice shoes - to reassure everyone that the accomplishments of artists and scientists are about to far outstrip those of any politician or government.

Or as Gaston put it, “You take two geniuses, you put them into a room together, and … wow.”

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer for AnnArbor.com.