“What do you see?” are the first words spoken in John Logan’s much honoured play, Red.
The words are spoken with such an urgency and despair that, by the end of the play, the simple looking splash of colour we are demanded to behold will take on a whole new dimension of meaning. Not only for the man on stage staring at the massive canvas, but to the audience as well. Logan’s two-man bio-drama, in the words of a review from Associated Press, is “An engrossing, often enthralling play about art, the artist and the act of creation.” Nominated for 7 Tony Awards – it won 6.
The artist is Mark Rothko who has been classified as an Abstract Expressionist (think Jackson Pollock) although he rejected the label. Rothko moved through many artistic styles, ranging from the figurative to abstract, until reaching his signature large scale works in the 1950’s (creating along the way – with Newman, Pollock, Still and Klein – the New York School of painting). He employed shimmering colour to convey his sense of spirituality. Highly informed by Nietzsche, Greek mythology and his Russian-Jewish heritage, his work was profoundly imbued with emotional content. The art world responded enthusiastically, his paintings began to sell for huge amounts of money, and the corporate world offered him large commissions. Rothko thought of himself as a “pure” artist and the commissions, and the resultant yin and yang between art and commerce, were a source of angst in the artists’ life.
It should be pointed out that many reject Rothko’s work completely. At first glance they seem to be mostly wide bands of colour and nothing else. I’m sure many will remember when the National Gallery of Canada paid $1.8 million for Barnett Newman’s “Voice of Fire” in 1989. That painting featured three vertical lines of colour – blue on the sides with a red stripe down the middle. Many Canadians, probably looking for Turner skies, a Manet sunrise or a Tom Thompson jack pine for their eight and half million dollars, were horrified.
The prolific Logan is best known for his screenplays for such films as the Oscar-winning Gladiator, Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. “I was doing a film in London. I love art and so I would go and haunt the Tate Modern gallery,” he told interviewer Charlie Rose. “They had the Seagram Murals in the room and they just grabbed my heart. I became obsessed – feeling there was something magnificently challenging about them – although I knew very little about Rothko. I know there were others in the room who found them superficial – it had no connection with them whatsoever. So I began to read about Rothko and abstract expressionism – specifically about the Seagram Murals. And I thought, ‘Yes!’ There was a play here. There was a fascinating character to explore.”
In 1958, the Seagram Company hired two of the world’s reigning architects – Mies Van der Rohe and Philip Johnson to create a new building on Park Avenue. It was the first modernist structure in the city and they wanted only the best. The heart of the building was to be the very up-scale Four Seasons Restaurant. Remembers Logan, “They thought of several artists, including de Kooning, and finally went to Rothko and said, ‘We want you to do the murals for the restaurant. We’ll pay you thirty-five thousand dollars’ – at that time the highest fee ever paid for an art commission. Rothko thought about it for a while and accepted the commission.” Red examines Rothko’s turmoil over his decision.
It was a two year project and Rothko rented a gym in the Bowery and set up his studio. But he was not happy. He told his friend, John Fisher, the publisher of Harper’s, that his true intention for the murals was to paint, “…something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room.”
In the play, Rothko hires an assistant, Ken, to help him mix the paints, make the frames and prepare the canvases. (Red is what is called a “work” play in which the characters perform all the tasks on stage, developing their characters through the movement.) Rothko was a prickly fellow, a man of fierce opinions and didactic arguments. Over the two years of the commission, Ken, who starts off in fear of the great man, slowly becomes his own man with his own opinions and is soon giving as much as he gets. The sessions in the studio, discussing the nature of art, become very heated.
There is yet another level to the play – a Socratic one: the relationship between teacher and pupil. Or, if you will, even Oedipal. Because of the closeness of the two, critics have suggested that it more closely resembles father and son. Logan presents Ken as not only Rothko’s puritanical conscience but as a spokesman for a whole new generation of artists – Andy Warhol and his company of pop artists, whose influence was just beginning to be felt. Rothko hated them for their comic book inspiration, their lack of depth and substance and “seriousness.” But as Eddy Redmayne, who won the Tony for his Broadway performance observes, “Ken challenges his mentor as to where he stands now that the entire nature of art is moving on. There is a line in the play, “You must kill your father. Respect him but kill him in order for the generations to move on.’”
Rothko explored the compositional potential of colour and form on the human psyche. To quote one critic, “To stand in front of a Rothko is to be in the presence of the pulsing vibrancy of his enormous canvases; it is to feel, if only momentarily, something of the sublime spirituality he relentlessly sought to evoke.” Said the artist himself, “If you are only moved by colour relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom.”
In Red, the paintings themselves, painstaking replicas of the originals, are, in the words of Alfred Molina, who played Rothko on Broadway, “…characters in the play. They, and the feelings they generate, are the point of the discussion. The whole play is an emotional and intellectual debate between two people and the paintings are the third part of that debate.”
It is hard to imagine anyone in Canada more equipped to direct Red than Kim Collier. It was Collier who, as director, brought us the brilliant, visual, tour-de-force Studies in Motion last year – a work that recreated on stage Eadweard Muybridge’s first, tentative effort at making motion pictures. Kim is a dancer, mime, actress, playwright and director with a dazzling sense of the visual. Asks Collier, “Could Rothko’s passionate images reach us on a spiritual level beyond politics, beyond time and social circumstance touching our common humanity? As a spectator in a gallery in the presence of his monumental paintings, that has been my experience. I have been truly moved and physically struck by his paintings. In a sense, Red is a play about faith versus doubting ourselves, in our work and in our place in the world.”
Collier has also chosen two of Canada’s most distinguished performers for her leads. Rothko will be played by Jim Mezon, the long-time Shaw actor/director whose appearances have ranged from Pygmalion to Peer Gynt, and as Ken, Jim Coomber, whose work includes The Secret Garden and Rent.
Says Collier, “In Red, we see Rothko struggle with the ultimate truth that we all have to eventually step aside and make room for regeneration, the cycles of life: rebirth, renewal, life and death.”
On February 25, 1970, Mark Rothko stood before one of his paintings in his Bowery workshop. He was aging – a brain aneurism destroyed his ability to paint the massive canvases that he loved. He sliced his arm with the razor they found lying at his side. He was 66 years old.
Red, a co-production between Canadian Stage, the Vancouver Playhouse and the Citadel opens in the Shoctor Theatre on February 11.