Plenty of writers have pondered what would have happend if the rule of Adolf Hitler had taken a different, perhaps even more horrific turn (Phllip Roth’s The Plot Against America comes to mind). The latest in this sort of “What If?” series comes from playwright Ariel Dorfman (most famous for Death And The Maiden, his meditation on vengeance), who has re-imagined the life of artist Pablo Picasso to have ended decades earlier, by the hands of a Nazi officer.

In Picasso’s Closet, now making its world premiere at Theater J, Dorfman examines the four years Picasso (Mitchell Hebert) spent working in German-occupied Paris, when the artist’s work was not displayed publicly. It is an interesting time in the almost exhaustively-studied life of Picasso: he’s in the midst of a heavy affair with photographer Dora Maar (Katherine Clarvoe), and his incomparable Guernica has already been painted. Picasso’s would-be killer is Albert Lucht (Saxon Palmer), a soldier who saw the artist’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon at a younger age and is consumed with how violated the whores in the painting made him feel. Lucht stalks Picasso for years before capturing him, hoping to make his own personal “masterpiece” out of the man’s murder.

The themes, story and structure of Picasso’s Closet are engrossing throughout the work (which features three acts and two intermissions). The play raises intriguing questions regarding to what extent Picasso was obligated to fight Nazi rule, and whether he did enough to help those friends who took a clearer stance against the war. The play’s structure seamlessly melds events present and past, hypothetical and historical. It gives us a window into the damaged, passionate relationship between Maar and Picasso, and creates a chillingly compelling villian in the figure of Lucht.