Red

Play by John Logan
Directed by Michael Grandage
With Alfred Molina (Mark Rothko), Eddie Redmayne (Ken)

Golden Theatre (Broadway)
New York, NY

Mark Rothko was one of the great American painters of the mid-twentieth century. He is noted as an principal exponent of the New York School of that era and, along with Jackson Pollock, as a principal representative of the style that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism. The works for which he became best known frequently feature two or three hazily edged colored rectangles stacked vertically on a colored, but gesturally diverse, background. Though this formula sounds minimalist, these so-called color field paintings are widely varied otherwise, in color, gesture and more subtle forms of composition. For those who love Rothko’s work – and I do – there is something poetic and profound about these pieces.

Red is a decent and thoughtful two-actor play that depicts Rothko and an assistant named Ken, over a period of what appears to be several months, in a series of scenes in Rothko’s studio. It emphasizes the single metaphor of the color red to bring out conflicting sides of Rothko’s life and work. On the one hand, red symbolizes life and vitality, and, on the other hand, blood and danger.

This dominant metaphor is an interesting poetic vehicle, but, I thought it might be a bit too much of a singular emblem, and a too facile lens, for the complex subject of the play. As well, many other colors form the backbones of Rothko’s canvases and that the selection of red as particularly and dramatically significant seemed, to a certain extent, like a forced abstraction. Nonetheless, this is a drama about art, not reportage, so, on another level, I just took it in.

The play is short – about 90 minutes, without intermission (seemingly a trend these days – is this to accommodate shorter attention spans of the current generation of theatre goers, make more time for dinner, or just give urologists more business?) and the brevity of the narrative, along with the consolidation of the metaphor, sometimes threatens to overly distill what might demand a bit more elaboration.

However – and this is a BIG however – Alfred Molina is an amazing actor. He embodies Rothko with such conviction that it is very difficult to separate the success of Red from his incredible performance. As with all truly great performances, it’s hard to find the space between the actor and the role. And here, there is virtually no space between Molina and Rothko.

In brief retrospect, I am really struck by the range of his roles and his compelling performances in them: he was a vivid and robust Diego Rivera in the film Frida (2002) and most believable as the hesitant father in the film An Education (2009).

Much of Red is about the drama associated with the ascendancy and the displacement of artistic movements. Logan makes a strong point about Rothko’s determination, along with other members of his artistic generation, to overturn his artistic predecessors and his anxiety about being overturned by his successors. Logan’s Rothko is headstrong and self-centered, and the implication of Red is that this fueled his success as well as his downfall.

In 1970, Rothko committed suicide. In some ways, Rothko’s star had come and gone, yielding to newer movements, notably Pop Art. Logan makes a big point about this displacement and represents the energy behind this new artistic generation in the character of Ken, Rothko’s assistant. Ken seeks Rothko’s support and approval, but, in the end, it’s Rothko’s throwing Ken out on his own that demonstrates Rothko’s greatest belief in Ken’s future. It’s a wonderful moment which conveys an important feature of what artistic tutelage is about.

Up to this point, Ken tries, hesitatingly, to get Rothko to look at his work and give him advice, to which, at one point, Rothko responds: what we’re doing here is about me, not you! It’s unbelievably harsh and cold, but it’s vivid. And when, in the end, as Rothko acknowledges the setting of his own star and the rising of the next generation of stars, his seemingly heartless gesture to banish Ken comes across as a brusque, but honest and direct, affirmation of Ken’s promise.

The last line of the play is memorable. Rothko, has just asked Ken, the assistant, as he so often has done earlier in the play, what he sees in a painting. Ken pauses, looks, then says simply as he prepares to exit: I see red. Given what’s come before, it’s a beautiful, pointed and weighty line. Redmayne delivers it beautifully, capping a performance which is clearly a support to Molina’s tour de force but competent and effective.

Logan’s drama prompts one to ask how much the challenge to Rothko’s ambition by the inevitability of the historic changing of the artistic guard was relevant to the tragedy of his death.

Alternatively, one might speculate that great and passionate artists like Rothko often work in a flurry of energy, are amazingly productive, and then burn out. Towards the end of his life, Rothko’s paintings frequently became stark and devoid of colors apart from black and white, truly a departure from the exuberance of the earlier work. He may have been depressed by the advent of Pop Art, but, as well, he may have just come to an artistic threshold that represented a terminus of a stage of his own work.

Van Gogh faced a similar fate after an unbelievably productive ten year period of painting. After working exuberantly with virtually no stop, he finally ran into a wall. Unfortunately, both in Rothko’s and Van Gogh’s cases, the artistic letdown led to total exhaustion, depression and, finally, self-destruction.

It seems plausible that in Rothko’s case, as in Van Gogh’s, there was no clear vision of how to proceed artistically. In Logan’s rendition, it seems as though the coming of Pop Art was the death knell. But, equally, one could say, the death knell, in Rothko’s and van Gogh’s cases, was the incapacity to make a transition to a next phase of artistic vision. History was not solely responsible for their self-destruction. A combination of lack of a successive vision – a next direction for creative work – and a perhaps too-rigid attachment to a prior mode of artistic engagement, might well have been more significant.

Ironically, in a more profound historical sense, Rothko was on the verge of becoming truly classic. What may have appeared to him as an eclipse by Pop Art was a phase of decline that only yielded, for him, a place in the pantheon of great contemporary artists. This is truly tragic, when one thinks of his own suicide as a potential response to obscuration.

Whatever conclusion one comes to about Rothko’s personal fate, this play, and particularly Molina’s performance, stimulate important reflection on the impulses and influences upon this modern master.

The play has a wonderful dramatic enactment early on in which Rothko and Ken together, very quickly, prime a large canvas, centrally placed on stage, all in red. It’s an energetic performance and adds a great moment. It’s as vivid as when, at the end of Yazmina Reza’s play Art (first produced in 1994, Tony award winner for best play in 1998), one of the characters takes a marker and draws upon a valuable canvas. In Art, that moment made the audience gasp. In Red, this moment makes the audience cheer.

– BADMan