Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as Ken in a scene from Red
(Photo credit: John Persson)
“What do you see?”
These are abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko’s first words in John Logan’s fascinating new play, Red, an investigation into creativity in the arts. Alfred Molina’s bigger than life performance as the artist as threatened lion pacing his own self-created cage fills the stage of the Golden Theater. Direct from its acclaimed London run at The Donmar Warehouse, artistic director Michael Grandage (Frost/Nixon) again stages the two-character drama by the American playwright with a sure hand.
The play is not for everyone. Those who are interested in the process of creativity and what makes art will be riveted. The discussion of the visual arts encompasses Pop Art, Jackson Pollock and Matisse all the way back to Rembrandt and Caravaggio. The ideas spill over from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy with its contrasting the Apollonian ideal of order with the Dionysian ideal of chaos, seen in the play as the difference between Rothko and his rival, Pollock. This discussion of how to see is applicable to all the arts and all forms of creativity. Adam Cork’s original score and sound design makes music played on a phonograph another component of the debate.
As the play is structured as a five scene debate spread over two years between the aging artist and his young assistant as they work, those who are not interested in the meaning of Art will be bored. However, it is a heady mixture of ideas and philosophy, as challenging as it is remarkable. The play will also teach you how to look at art if you let it. Additionally it explores the mentor/protégé, teacher/student, father/son relationship that can be found in most walks of life.
Although not a strict docudrama, Red is based on a true situation. In 1958, Rothko, then one of the most famous abstract expressionists (a term he hated as a description of his own work) was commissioned to paint a set of murals for The Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building designed by Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe, then being constructed on Park Avenue. At $35,000 (worth $2 million today) this was the largest commission ever offered to an artist. Rothko planned to paint 30 – 40 murals from which three or four canvases were to be chosen.
However, Rothko was under the impression when he accepted the commission that it was to decorate a canteen for the workers in the building, not for one of the most expensive restaurants in New York. This pleased him greatly as both a socialist and Jewish intellectual. When the artist visited the finished Four Seasons restaurant when it opened in 1960 (as Molina’s Rothko reports in a dazzling monologue in the play), he was shocked by its bourgeois atmosphere, staff and clientele. The rest is history.
The play is set in Rothko’s studio at 222 Bowery where he had rented an empty gymnasium and had installed a pulley system that could raise, lower and display paintings at various angles. When the audience enters the theater, they may not be aware that Molina as Rothko is sitting in a chair contemplating one of Richard Nutbourne’s glorious reproductions of the huge Seagram murals in saturated maroon. Other canvases are displayed on either side of the room, and the implication is that an imaginary one hangs on the fourth wall in front of the audience.
In walks Ken, played by Eddie Redmayne, an applicant for the job of assisting Rothko. As part of the interview, Rothko demands that Ken examine the painting before us and tell him what he sees. Rothko then explains how to look at his work: “Let it pulsate. Let it work on you. … Let it wrap its arms around you; let it embrace you … Engage with it!” And the first student/teacher lesson has begun, as well as our seeing what they see. The pulley system on Christopher Oram’s set also allows the two men to shift the huge canvases around so that in each scene we examine a different example of the Seagram murals.
Considering that the real Rothko was fanatical about how his paintings were lit, Neil Austin has done a superb job of lighting the canvases before us. This is demonstrated in a later scene when Ken turns up the lights to their full brightness and washes out the rich colors of the murals completely. As another scene ends and the lights fade, the canvas facing the audience begins to glow from within, a luminous trick that is left unexplained.
In the course of the play’s five scenes, we watch Rothko and Ken prime canvases, mix paints, etc., as they discuss art, music, philosophy and culture in general. We also watch as Ken, an aspiring painter, learns from his teacher and grows, both in his ideas and in his ability to fence verbally with Rothko. It is made patently clear from the beginning that whatever the outcome of the play, the student will graduate to challenge both Rothko’s art and ideas.
Inevitably, the play comes around to the problem of what happens to the aging artist when the new generation (here the Pop Artists) arise and make their forebears obsolete, an event that happens in all the arts. Just as occurred in real life, it is the assistant’s challenge to Rothko to visit the Seagram Building to see where his murals are to be hung that precipitates the play’s climax.
Molina who has previously appeared on the New York stage in Yasmina Reza’s Art and a revival of the musical, Fiddler on the Roof, gives his best performance yet as Rothko: arrogant, self-centered, melancholic, over-intellectual, bitter, raging. His Rothko is still able to take us by surprise even after he has established his character. A good deal taller than the real Rothko, but almost exactly the same age that the artist was at the time he painted the Seagram murals, Molina dominates the stage, Ken and his audience as he expounds on his theories of art while at work.
In the underwritten role of Ken, an amalgam of several real-life Rothko assistants, Redmayne holds his own both as a listener and verbal adversary. He also represents the next generation of artists already knocking on the door. Some of his back story doesn’t ring true, but this doesn’t damage the play to any great extent.
John Logan has specialized in biographical dramas and screenplays, such as Never the Sinner dramatizing the Leopold and Loeb case, Hauptmann depicting the Lindberg kidnapping, The Aviator about billionaire Howard Hughes, and RKO 281 concerning Orson Welles and the making of Citizen Kane. Red is his most daring and challenging play to reach New York. If you are willing to let it work on you like a Mark Rothko painting, you can expect a unique experience. Under Michael Grandage’s forceful direction, Alfred Molina gives a titanic performance as an artist at the height of his powers about to start the uneasy fall from grace.
Red (through June 27)
John Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or http://www.telecharge.com