How to Steal a Picasso, at the Unicorn, is funny but a little too easy

Aspiring art thieves, take note: There’s less heist than hijinx in the Unicorn’s How to Steal a Picasso. The farce, a world premiere by playwright William Missouri Downs, is an entertaining (if unchallenging) race to curtain.

The play begins with the return of a prodigal son: Johnny Smith (Tommy Gorrebeeck), a talented painter once banished from his family for forging famous artworks. Johnny swears he’s reformed — he’s now a copyright lawyer — but his artist father, Otto (Walter Coppage), is in no mood for reconciliation.

After quitting his day job at a museum in a fit of self-confidence (he won “the first annual Yoko Ono Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award for Non-Objective Art,” he says), Otto is now under investigation. A beloved painting — Picasso’s 1938 “Girl Reading” — has disappeared, hours before its planned sale to a corporate client. The museum suspects the Smiths are to blame.

It’s not hard to guess why. There’s Johnny’s twin sister, Casey (Katie Kalahurka), whose artistic practice involves pissing in Taco Bell meat and putting goldfish through a blender. There’s Otto, who paints derivative Pollack “splatters” while lecturing his kids on the dangers of imitation. And there’s Belle (Cathy Barnett), the Véra to Otto’s low-rent Nabokov, fixing snacks and smoothing conflicts between her husband’s bullheaded outbursts.

Director Gary Heisserer and his actors paint a vivid portrait of a world in which everyone has just snorted a small mountain of Adderall. No one’s working against the material here; the actors tap into the energy of a pinball machine, all flashing lights and erratic chimes and emotions that pivot with the stroke of a flipper.

Barnett is a highlight from start to finish. She sashays around the stage like a mall walker, hands paddling through the air as she fusses, prods or pours drinks. Kalahurka’s performance is brassy in the best way, and newcomer Gorrebeeck is convincing, if stylistically out of step (a mostly classical resume might explain some residual stiffness). Darren Kennedy deploys sharp physical humor in a thin role as ostensible villain and human biscotto Mr. Walker.

Walter Coppage infuses Otto with a feverish intensity and unfettered silliness we don’t often get to see from the stage veteran. The tone is just right for the character’s brutish brand of narcissism, though even Coppage struggles at times to motivate his increasingly illogical outbursts.

Set designer Gary Mosby gives the actors room to run with a box set that stretches nearly the full length of the Levin stage. Tibetan prayer flags (one of Casey’s art projects) tangle around the front entrance like Christmas-tree lights. Sarah M. Oliver’s costumes are showstoppers, from Belle’s gaudy palazzo jumpsuit and ruffled kimono to Otto’s droopy khakis and comically oversized sport coat. A separate hair and makeup designer isn’t credited, but those looks are on point, too, from Belle’s poison-blue eyeshadow to Casey’s art-chic(k) dye job.

Picasso is an unapologetically zany joke fest, but Downs finds time to toss a few telling contradictions into the fray. Otto rages against the banality of forgery but finds real joy in a counterfeit award. Mr. Walker is desperate to get his hands on an abstract painting but screeches at a child about using the wrong crayon colors for a Thanksgiving turkey.

The critique could be interesting, but it’s buried in the show’s finale: 10 minutes of abject Tasering and incomprehensible shouting.

Another script problem feels like a holdover from Downs’ last Unicorn project (2015’s Women Playing Hamlet). Specifically: exposition that’s too plain for farce and too loud for realism. Throughout the show, family members describe one another as though they were filing a missing-person report.

A bigger problem is that for all the script’s left-field antics, its targets are relatively staid. The best farces offer us a buffet of excess, their characters reflecting our worst impulses back at us in a funhouse mirror. But when the vices are identical, the punch lines are, too. Downs’ characters seem popped from the same mold of high-strung lowbrow narcissists; his humor stems from a single vision of artists as huckster-provacateurs.

We laugh at the Smith family as we might an alien specimen, feeling more superiority than sheepish self-recognition. The result is undeniably funny, but farce fans may long for a sharper, more surprising edge.