John Logan’s Red soars

DANA SCHLANGER

The painter and his assistant stand in a fleeting moment of silence before the storm. Young Ken has just told the master that one of his canvases needs “more red.” Rothko explodes: “You mean scarlet? You mean crimson? You mean plum-mulberry-magenta-burgundy-salmon-carmine-carnelian-coral? Anything but red! What is red?”

What ensues is a throng of vivid images exchanged at machine-gun speed, brilliantly capturing the essence of two generations through the associations that “red” elicits. While the young man’s references are from the surrounding contemporary world and from nature, the older man’s are inspired by culture, art history and philosophy. Therein lies a shift of history and relevance, from the middle-aged, radical, Russian-born Brooklyn Jew, for whom culture is at the core of his being, to the keen young American who takes reality and society at face value and whose consciousness is unencumbered by the weight of history. And all this takes place in rapid, vibrant, acidic, intellectual verbiage that makes the mind soar, just as the music of Mozart and Schubert that intermittently fills the stage is a delight for the soul.

Most people know a Mark Rothko when they see it (in the play, the artist, recognizing this familiarity, quips, ”I am a noun, a commodity!”), but not many know his life story and how his work matured from representative and mythological subjects, to the rectangular fields of color and light, pulsing and vibrating, exemplifying the Abstract Expressionist style that made him famous.

Marcus Rothkowitz (1903-1970) was born in Dvinsk, in the Pale of Settlement, to a Jewish professional and intellectual family, which provided the Rothkowitz children with a secular and political, rather than exclusively religious, upbringing. Rothko was 10 when he arrived in America, and he continued on the path taken by many Eastern European Jews, those who became the artistic and intellectual giants of the United States of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. That milieu often included a strong leftist political alignment, an openness to the avant-garde and a certain distance from their Jewish heritage, perceived to be part of the Old World they had left behind. A rise of Nazi sympathy in the United States heightened Jewish fears of antisemitism, one reason why, in 1940, the artist changed his name to Mark Rothko. He perfected his signature style in the mid-1940s and, a decade later, was heralded as a standard bearer of Abstract Expressionism, the “New American Painting.” As Rothko achieved fame and a degree of financial comfort, he was gradually superseded by the success of what became Pop Art, which had captured the American imagination by the mid-1950s.

It is at this stage in the artist’s life that John Logan’s play, Red, captures Rothko’s unyielding personality. Logan, a playwright and screenwriter, became fascinated with Rothko’s story after experiencing the “Four Seasons” murals in London’s Tate Modern. His initial reaction: “I couldn’t breathe. It was almost as though someone had punched me in the stomach.” Their iconic brooding color became the central symbol of Logan’s play, bringing Rothko and a fictional assistant to life in the very process of painting the murals, which had been commissioned in 1958 by the Seagram Company for the new luxury Four Seasons restaurant housed in their Park Avenue building. As Ken yells at Rothko in their big confrontational scene, “This is the flashiest mural commission since the Sistine Chapel!”

There may be something a little clichéd about the formula of the play, the two-character, mentor-disciple dynamic and a story that wraps up too neatly, but the brilliant dialogue and the larger-than-life Rothko character, played by a talented Jim Mezon, makes up for the somewhat predictable development. It is no wonder that Red won six Tony awards in 2010.

Mezon, a veteran of the Vancouver and Toronto stages and leading member of the Shaw Festival company, is a Rothko who equally attracts and repels the viewer with his powerful, “conflicted, nuanced, troubled” interpretation, his bullying haughtiness interspersed with moments of emotional frailty. The tension between being the “high priest of modern art” and his awareness that “tragic is to grow superfluous in your own time” informs the play. A fiercely opinionated and verbose intellectual – “one of those thinky-talky Jews,” in his own words – Rothko charges his seemingly simple and extremely beautiful paintings with mythic, portentous significance; they are about despair, tragedy, ecstasy, doom. As Ken (newcomer David Coomber in a nuanced, but unremarkable performance) evolves from starry-eyed acolyte to a man of increased confidence, he becomes a true partner in the red-hot debates about the nature of life and art that are taking place in the artist’s studio. This is true, as well, in the intensely physical moments, such as the joint priming of a huge canvas to the swelling sounds of a Mozart Magic Flute chorus, a highly dramatic peak without dialogue in a play of many dramatic words, directed with an assured hand and great feeling by Kim Collier.

As Logan explained in an interview with Richard Ouzounian in the Toronto Star, “I gave Ken all the trump cards. In the fourth scene, when he really stands up and crests the wave like an animal, I gave him every argument I possibly could to demolish Rothko, and I think he does it successfully.” When Ouzounian compared the play to watching a fight movie, Logan agreed: “I hope so! It’s a two-character play. If it’s not like you’re watching a fight, you’re in trouble.” No wonder the audience reacted with standing ovations!

Red is at the Vancouver Playhouse until Feb. 4.

Dana Schlanger is a freelance writer and director of the Dena Wosk School of Performing Arts.

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