The Underpants

by Carl Sternheim, adapted by Steve Martin

Reviewed 14 April 2007

This is a really fun little play with a good dose of pain mixed in. The story is set around an unhappy marriage between a hearty but passionless German beauraucrat and a wife who’s ready for something far more romantic. When the wife Louise stands on her tiptoes to see the King passing by in a parade, her panties fall down, which wins her a lot of admiring suitors. The characters are all stereotypes from the stage plays of the late 19th and early 20th century plays—the sexy old maid living upstairs, the overblown romantic who’s too worked up trying to write about beauty to actually be able to make love. I’m curious what exactly Steve Martin did to adapt this play. I imagine that he’s partly responsible for making the dialogue so snappy. It move along at a terrific pace. And I also guess that he may have fleshed out the character of Ben Cohen from an anti-Semitic humbug charicature of a neurotic Jewish barber to a complex and ultimately sympathetic guy who helps our heroine reach a moment of independence similar to that in Ibsen’s “Doll’s House.” I wonder if it wasn’t also Martin’s choice to end the play on this emancipatory note?