Painting the Golden Theatre “Red”
In John Logan‘s play Red,
which I saw a little over a week ago, Mark Rothko (played by Alfred
Molina, who formerly channeled
Diego Rivera) comes across as an intensely committed, brilliant
artist, but one given to verbiage that’s frequently tendentious and
pretentious. This makes for a night of theater that is sometimes
exhilarating but often a slog.
The problem is not Logan’s
ability to write good lines. The utterances of “Ken,” Rothko’s fictional
studio assistant, are utterly convincing and emotionally involving, especially as
delivered by Eddie Redmayne, whose performance in the play’s
inaugural production at London’s Donmar Warehouse won him the Olivier
award for best supporting actor (a fact unmentioned in the theater
program for New York production, which does include an essay on Rothko by Simon Schama). Redmayne acts as if he’s making up
his lines as he goes along, grappling for words to describe his raw
responses to the paintings, to the painter and to a horrific trauma from
his own past.
Logan has asserted
(scroll down, click “Transcript”) that his play is “not reportage. It’s not
biography.” But it sticks quite closely to Rothko’s actual words and
ideas, as detailed in James E.B. Breslin‘s 1993 biography
of the artist, which I had thumbed through (reading the entire chapter
on the “The Seagram Murals,” the focus of the play) before taking my
seat in the theater.
Most of Rothko’s pronouncements about art
and life may make good
art history, but they’re not the stuff of
great dramatic art. He did, however, occasionally get off some pointed
zingers. From Breslin we learn, for example, that Rothko really did
utter the following sentiment, which elicits a chuckle from the audience:
I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch
who ever eats in that room.
“That room” is Philip
Johnson‘s posh Four Seasons restaurant in Mies van der Rohe‘s
then new Seagram building, where Rothko’s commissioned murals, produced and pondered over the course of the play,
were intended to hang.
A two-hander and one-setter (the artist’s
studio), this hermetic evening tells us about (rather than showing us)
Rothko’s most dramatic moments: his experience of a gallery show of
the Pop artists who are destined to kick Rothko’s generation upstairs; and, most notably, the fateful evening when Rothko dined (with his wife
who, like his daughter, is ignored by the play) at the newly opened Four
Seasons. He felt such intense revulsion at the snobby scene that he
pulled out of the whole project in disgust.
The play’s most
entrancing passage, admired by most reviewers (even those with otherwise
strong reservations), was the wordless, deftly choreographed coating of
a canvas with red ground—Rothko slathering the top half; Ken
dodging and weaving to get access to the lower half, getting himself splattered blood-red in the process.
In real life, there was no
“Ken.” But there was, indeed, an assistant who (like Ken) was also a
painter—Dan Rice. According to Breslin’s biography, the
Rothko-Rice choreography included a crucial prop that the play prudently
omitted—a ladder:
Rice…assisted Rothko in
applying the ground color, a mixture of rabbit-skin glue and colored
pigment. “Glue would just cool too fast on a big painting,” said Rice,
“so often he would work on a ladder and I would work underneath until I
was dripping with the stuff,” then they would trade places and Rothko
would be covered with the glue.
For those who know
Rothko’s biographical basics, this play is full of portentous
foreshadowing of tragedies to come. In characterizing Jackson Pollock‘s
fatal car accident as a suicide, Rothko lets slip that “when” (not
“if”) he killed himself, there would be no such ambiguity about his
intentions. He mentions his fears that the black (despair) in his
paintings may eventually overtake the red (life force). This did, in
fact, happen in his powerful late work. Every so often in the play, the artist, who later
(along with his wife Mell) had big issues with alcohol, abruptly plies his assistant with drink.
Despite some tedious and
ponderous passages, I suspect that this play will drive some theater buffs
not well versed in the visual arts to seek out the real Rothko—his
paintings.
That could well be the best thing that can be said
about “Red.”
For much more on the Seagram Murals (including images), go to the Tate Modern’s website. Rothko donated nine of the murals to the Tate in 1969. Seven others, according to Breslin’s book, are at the Kawamura Museum of Modern Art, Japan; 13 at the National Gallery, Washington; others in the collection of Rothko’s children—Kate, who was alive when the murals were being painted; Christopher, born later.