“An ambitious amalgam of comic book and social commentary… slamming doors, and sophisticated repartee…valiantly eccentric…Martin shakes the time-honored belief in the seriousness of silliness.” The New York Times

Playwright Carl Sternheim’s 1911 German comedy Die Hose, (The Underpants) was the first in a six-play cycle ironically titled "Comedies from the Heroic Life of the Middle Class." At first it was banned by the German imperial authorities, but the world premiere, staged in Berlin by the legendary Max Reinhardt, was eventually allowed after its suggestive title was changed to The Giant.

When Steve Martin’s adaptation opened in New York in 2002, critics suggested that a glimpse of knickers, even when the Kaiser’s parade is passing, no longer carried the weight necessary to motivate a farce in the 21st century. Then along came Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl. Exposed "accidentally" or not during a national event, her wardrobe-malfunction ignited a political firestorm -- just like in The Underpants.

Martin had never heard of The Underpants when the Classic Stage, an Off Broadway theatre company, invited him to adapt it. "I like the title." Martin said. He had already successfully adapted two classic pieces: Cyrano de Bergerac became his film Roxanne (Martin was honored with 1987 award for Best Screenplay from the Writers Guild of America), and he turned Silas Marner into A Simple Twist of Fate.

“I have come to understand that however true I intend to remain to the original text,” Martin writes in his notes on The Underpants, the adaptation is continuously influenced, altered, and redefined by modern times. Each time, the process has taken me through the stages of a bad marriage: fidelity, transgression, and finally separation.”
“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.
…I found something else that it was about: fame. So I changed the thrust of the play from being a social commentary…to sort of a discourse on momentary fame." Louise is briefly the center of attention, but her fame is accidental, or tangential. “That's what this play was about for me."

Is fame a burden for Steve Martin?

"Depends on your mood. The benefits of fame are really fantastic, I must say. You have a right to complain, of course, but -- privately."

Sternheim was born in Leipzig, and studied philosophy at the University of Munich but never graduated. Steve Martin was born in Waco, Texas and studied philosophy at California State University at Long Beach. He also did not graduate, but fame has its privileges: In 1989 CSU Long Beach gave him an honorary doctorate.