Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne in “Red.” Photograph by Steve Pyke.
Mark Rothko’s life was a series of abdications: from Russia, when he was ten; from his father, who died six months after arriving in Portland, Oregon; from Yale, after two years; and from life itself, when he committed suicide, on February 25, 1970. A fractious, hard-drinking, unhealthy, and unhappy soul, Rothko was a gourmand of his griefs. By contrast, his large, luminous abstract canvases—spectacles of subtraction of all subject matter, including the self—turned abdication into an art form. Rothko was the first to paint “empty” pictures. His blocks of floating iridescence were the public answer to Action painting; privately, they were also a kind of vanishing act. At a party where Expressionism was being discussed, Rothko leaned over to the art critic Harold Rosenberg and whispered, “I don’t express myself in my paintings; I express my not-self.” In John Logan’s “Red” (elegantly directed by Michael Grandage, at the Golden), Rothko (Alfred Molina) is onstage twenty minutes before the play begins. He’s in his studio, a vast cave of consciousness that, subtly designed by Christopher Oram, also suggests a sanctuary. Rothko sits in a blue wooden chair with his back to us, surrounded by unfinished canvases that are propped against the high, dingy walls; he is studying one of five huge murals that he’s been commissioned to do for the new Seagram Building. His first gesture, once the play begins, is to walk up to the painting and feel the canvas with the flat of his hand. Rothko is already well inside the painting; the success of Logan’s smart, eloquent entertainment is to bring us in there with him. For a month in 1949, Rothko went to the Museum of Modern Art to stand in front of Matisse’s “The Red Studio,” which the museum had newly acquired. Looking at it, he said, “you became that color, you became totally saturated with it.” Rothko turned his transcendental experience into an artistic strategy; his work demanded surrender to the physical sensation of color. “Compressing his feelings into a few zones of color,” Rosenberg wrote, “he was at once dramatist, actor, and audience of his self-negation.” Rothko escaped from the hell of personal chaos into the paradise of color. “To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience,” he said. “However, you paint the large picture, you are in it.” Logan’s theatrical conceit is to introduce an assistant into Rothko’s solitude, an aspiring painter named Ken (the excellent Eddie Redmayne). Over two years, between 1958 and 1960, he becomes Rothko’s student, gofer, whipping boy, and sounding board. In teaching Ken how to look at his art, Rothko indirectly teaches us. It’s an exciting education. Logan’s dialogue is a sleight of hand; behind its wallop is a lot of learning. “Nature doesn’t work for me,” Rothko says at one point. “The light’s no good.” The play then demonstrates the point. Ken switches on the overhead white fluorescent lights, which flatten the canvas and break the painting’s spell. “You see how it is with them? How vulnerable they are?” Rothko says after he’s returned the room to its crepuscular glow. “People think I’m controlling: controlling the light; controlling the height of the pictures; controlling the shape of the gallery. . . . It’s not controlling—it’s protecting.” Pontifical, obsessive, opinionated, vain, arrogant, and brilliant, Rothko had a sour wit. “How’s business?” he used to say to artist friends. Logan sometimes appropriates Rothko’s epigrams (“Silence is so accurate”), but his own idiom is well wrought and delightful. He doesn’t just tell; he also shows, at one point having Rothko collaborate with Ken in mixing paint and priming canvases. As classical music blasts from the record player, they slather the paint over the canvas, a balletic, two-minute explosion of activity that deftly conjures what most plays about artists don’t: the exhilaration of the act. As Rothko, the strapping Molina burns up the stage. Head shaved, striding across the studio with his barrel chest thrust forward, he is all feistiness and creative ferocity. Even in silence, he exudes a remarkable gravity. He also makes a gorgeous fuss. “I am here to stop your heart, you understand that?” he bellows at Ken, in one of their arguments about painting. “I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!” Is there any contemporary actor who can roar like Molina? His big torso is a boom box that turns his lacerating words into a force field. For instance, in a moment of inspiration, just as Rothko is about to wield his five-inch housepainter’s brush, Ken misguidedly answers a rhetorical question about what the painting needs: red, Ken suggests. “By what right do you speak? . . . Who the fuck are you? What have you done?” Rothko shouts, throwing packets of red paint at him in his fury. “You mean scarlet? You mean crimson? You mean plum-mulberry-magenta-burgundy-salmon-carmine-carnelian-coral? Anything but ‘red’! What is ‘red’?!” It’s a terrific moment, shrewdly conceived and terrifying to watch. Molina is withering and dangerous; his achievement is to suggest in Rothko’s obsession both the madness and the grandeur of a great artist playing for keeps. “Red” is built around a canard—that Rothko painted the murals for the Four Seasons restaurant, in the Seagram Building, which was still under construction when he accepted the rich commission. He didn’t. Rothko, who had strong feelings about the public display of his work—eight hundred of his paintings were unsold when he died—was under the impression that the murals would be displayed in the lobby of the prestigious new building. He “refused to deliver them when he learned that they would be placed not in the lobby but in an adjoining restaurant,” Rosenberg wrote. Nonetheless, it’s a good story and a good hook on which Logan hangs his scintillating discourse about Rothko and modern art. Rothko frequently refers to his paintings as tragic. In the shifting movement of red and black in the murals, Logan suggests Rothko’s encroaching darkness. “There’s only one thing I fear in life, my friend,” he says. “One day the black will swallow the red.” While the play hints at dark things to come, it doesn’t linger on them; Logan prefers to emphasize the manic bits of the painter’s depressed personality.
John Lahr
The New Yorker
