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If one decided to create a theatrical production about a famous visual artist, most playwrights wouldn’t opt for the New York School color field painter Mark Rothko.
After all, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, frustrated and cantankerous abstract expressionist — who claimed that he was not an abstract expressionist — doesn’t have the name recognition, cultural cachet or the oomph factor of Henri Matisse or Vincent van Gogh or Pablo Picasso or Frida Kahlo or Andy Warhol.
Furthermore, Rothko lacked the movie star good looks of Willem de Kooning and the palpable Wyoming cowboy mystique of Jackson Pollock, his “Irascible” compatriots.
But nonetheless, American playwright John Logan did just that when he wrote “Red,” a two-handed, one-set play that premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in London in December 2009, starring Alfred Molina as Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as Ken, a fictionalized studio assistant. It was directed by the British director Michael Grandage.
In March 2010, it moved onto the Golden Theatre on Broadway in New York City with the same two leads. Molina won the Drama League’s Distinguished Performance Award. “Red” won six Tony Awards, including Best Play, Best Featured Actor in a Play (for Redmayne) and Best Direction of A Play (for Grandage.)
And now “Red” is being performed at the Steeple Playhouse, sans Molina and Redmayne, of course.
But having had the opportunity to sit through an early run-through rehearsal, I can assure you that local actors Eric Paradis and Paul Inwood, portraying Rothko and Ken, respectively, are more than up to the task. It is directed by Suzanne Houbre and Nicole Perullo serves as stage manager.
The play all takes place in Rothko’s studio, an old gymnasium at 222 Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, circa 1958-1959. The floor of the set is covered with tarps spattered with varying hues of dark red stains.
A table is filled with pails of paint, packets of powdered pigment, egg cartons, jars of murky liquids and cans of paint brushes. I have spent countless hours in painting studios and it was enough to make me imagine that I could smell turpentine and burnt coffee.
On the other side of the stage is an era-appropriate phonograph and dozens of stacked classical records, as well as an array of half-filled liquor bottles, tumblers and ashtrays. It reads as a very time-specific brand of a bloated and toxic machismo.
Several canvases, almost the color of dried blood, are placed here and there. And then there is that inventive use of the “fourth wall,” that space between the stage and the audience, which doubles as a painting. When the actors peer at the painting, the audience stares back.
“Red” opens with Rothko dragging on a cigarette and looking at that space-that-is-a-painting when Inwood’s Ken walks in. He is starting his first day as a studio assistant. Rothko waves him over to look at the painting and asks “What do you see?”
But before Ken can answer, the beratement begins, setting the manically dark tone which will inform much of the production.
They banter a bit. One particular exchange ends with Rothko saying, “There’s a tragedy in every brush stroke,” before bullying his dumbfounded new aide into drinking an early morning glass of Scotch.
Ken has been hired to do the menial drudge work in the atelier. He is to stretch canvases, clean brushes, build stretchers, move paintings, sweep the floor, run out for smokes and booze and Chinese takeout, and tend to anything else Rothko wants, any other whim, “no matter how demanding or demeaning.”
A young, hungry and aspiring painter himself, Ken acquiesces.
And although he doesn’t know it that moment, Ken is, perhaps more importantly, there to be Rothko’s sounding board and a whipping boy stand-in for all his imagined enemies: other painters (past and present and those yet to come), museum curators, disgruntled viewers and yes, “goddamn son-of-a-bitch art critics.”
“Red” is not an art history lesson. But that said, Logan’s imagined dialogue between the very real painter and the make-believe assistant might move some attendees to dig a little deeper in the pivotal post-World War II era of Rothko and his usual suspect colleagues: the de Koonings (Willem and Elaine), Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline and more.
New York City had supplanted Paris as the “Center of the Art World.” Cubism and Surrealism had begun to wane. Pop Art had yet to arrive. Abstract expressionism — and jazz, its musical cousin — began to redefine what art was. Modernism had truly arrived.
Much of “Red” revolves around Rothko’s need for a studio assistant as he has been commissioned by the beverage company Joseph E. Seagram and Sons to produce a series of large-scale murals for the recently completed Seagram Building on Park Avenue.
Designed by the architects Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, the paintings were to be installed in the skyscraper’s new luxury restaurant, Four Seasons, serving “power lunches” before the term existed.
SPOILER ALERT: While delighted to be paid a princely sum, Rothko soon suffered an existential crisis of consciousness. His moral dilemma, of which I will say no more, is one of the primary forces that drives the play.
Paradis has previously played a famous painter. He was the lead in a production of Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” an absurdist comedy in which the Father of Cubism meets Albert Einstein in a Parisian cafe in 1904 and they engage in a somewhat whimsical and philosophical conversation about creativity as it relates to art and to science.
I cannot speak to Paradis’ comedic chops, but as a dramatist, he’s rockin’ it. With a gesture or a glare or the puff of a cigarette or a quickening pace across the stage, he manifests Rothko’s anger, envy and impatience without saying a word.
And when he does speak, he seems to be inhabited by the spirit of the didactic painter. From a whisper to a mutter to a grunt to a scream, he is formidable.
Inwood’s Ken is initially nervous as one might expect in the presence of Rothko. But he always holds his own. He puts up with Rothko’s diatribes, his self-pity, and his bullying and intimidation until he doesn’t. Ken has a past far more horrific than anything the old man could possibly visit upon him. When it is revealed, Rothko softens for a moment and soon rages again.
Inwood’s very demeanor, stance and expressions evoke compassion.
A particularly delightful moment in the play occurs when Rothko tells Ken that sunrise isn’t red. He responds that sunrise is red and red is sunrise.
And then something that titters between a sing-songy word association game and a rap battle erupts.
“Red is heart beat. Red is passion. Red wine. Red roses. Red lipstick. Beets. Tulips. Peppers.”
“Arterial blood.”
“That too.”
“Rust on the bike on the lawn.”
“And apples … and tomatoes.”
“Dresden firestorm at night. The sun in Rousseau, the flag in Delacroix, the robe in El Greco.”
Kudos to Paradis, Inwood and the behind the scenes crew.
Don’t think that “Red” is too esoteric. Red is life.
Mark Rothko said, “The only thing I fear in life, my friend: one day, the black will swallow the red.”
He committed suicide on Feb 25, 1970.
“Red,” which opened Friday, will be performed at Your Theatre at Steeple Playhouse, 159 William Street, New Bedford on Jan, 24-25 at 7:30 p.m. and on Jan. 25-26 at 2 p.m.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
Red is a strong production of one of the best plays of the past twenty-five years. Not to be missed. Kudos to Your Theatre for bringing it to the stage.