What do you see? A sort of review of the play ‘Red’

At the beginning of the play Red, Marcus Rothkowitz, better known to the world as Mark Rothko, asks the nervous young man who has just started working as his assistant, “What do you see?”

“Red,” the young man responds.  

At the end of the play, just before the lights fade to black, Rothko, as played by national treasure, Bart Guingona, asks the same young man, Ken (an excellent Joaquin Valdez), the same question, “What do you see?”

“Red,” he responds.

By the end of a heated 90-minute one-act performance which, within the confines of the story, spans a two year period in the life of one of the most famous painters of the post-war era, a period within which Rothko worked on a series of paintings destined for the Seagrams building in Manhattan, that word, signifying that most primary of primary colors and some of Rothko’s most famous paintings, means, to quote the two characters in the play, everything from “Sunrises” to “Viscera”, “Roses”, “Rabbit noses” and “Blood” to what it means to be human and what it takes to make great art.

When Ken, sweating in his suit, says it within a few minutes of meeting Rothko, the word “Red” denotes the young man’s naiveté and yet also, implicitly, his courage and his promise — not many fledgling artists would answer a master so directly. When the no-longer-quite-so-young-and-innocent artist utters the word “Red” before leaving Rothko’s studio for good, his own unwrapped painting under his arm, the word registers as a declaration of Ken’s maturity and understanding.  For Rothko’s assistant, a fiction introduced by the playwright, as well as for us, the audience, the word now encompasses anger and depression; pretension and disdain; tragedy and myth; light and dark; history and philosophy, life pulsing within and struggling against the swallowing void, art striving always for authenticity, truth, in all its complexity and self-contradiction –in short, the artist, Rothko. 

Funny enough, if you ever have the luck to see an actual Rothko, that is actually what you do see in those strangely grand and compelling chromatic canvases.  When you confront a Rothko or, for that matter, a room of Rothko paintings (which I have never had the privilege to do), you feel, as a writer for the Guardian put it, like you have to sit down.  That is the power of his art which, despite being, in some sense, no more than color on color, eats away at you, challenges, even mocks, you – like an unhealed wound or an old dream.

I caught ‘Red’ last weekend.  It was the last show of the play’s second run in the country.  The re-staging was due to the efforts of Actor’s Actors Inc.’s The Necessary Theatre and, probably, the force of acclaim – the play was a critical darling in the local theatre scene in 2013. I had kicked myself for missing it then and was delighted, downright monomaniacal in terms of forcing people to go see it, when I heard it was going to be staged this year.

I was curious about the play because, apart from a few paintings I had seen, I had no real understanding of Rothko’s life and his method.  I knew, vaguely, that he had built a small chapel for his art in Texas and that he had committed suicide before seeing it completed. I figured the play would fill in the gaps in my knowledge and it did but it also gave so much more.  What we got was a portrait of a great and troubled artist, a long discussion on what art is, but also a history of art from Picasso to Pollack, all the way through to Warhol.  It was not one of the best plays I have ever seen – I have pretty high standards — but the writing, as a friend put it, showed a “strong voice” and settled point of view. I was not surprised to find out that the playwright, John Logan, has won or been nominated for numerous Tony’s, the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes. I was also not that surprised to find out he also wrote the most recent James Bond film, Skyfall, and is penning the succeeding two Bond films.

I don’t think I have to say much here about Bart Guingona, except that I wish I saw him in more theatre productions.  I wish he and his team (kudos to them as well) would get the required patronage to produce and/or act in more plays like this one.  It would be a pleasure to see an actor and director of Bart’s caliber take on, for example, David Hare’s political plays and this is my way of putting that hope out there for the universe to fulfill.  Joaquin Valdez owned his role as Rothko’s beleaguered assistant, its awkwardness, its required display of humility, grit and growth.  I can’t say he is a revelation because from what I read he has been in the acting business for a long time and I am rarely surprised anymore by the quality of our local theatre actors, though I am glad to see a young and extremely talented one given a chance to show what he can do.

Rothko is, hands down, my favorite painter, someone whose work I use as a kind of personal rorshchach test.  Do you like Rothko?  Depending on your answer, I determine, rightly or wrongly, your wholeness or your brokenness, your inclination for the light or for the dark, your need for convention or your instinct to oppose it. When I see a Rothko, I see a soul shrieking across the decades, across death. When I turn away from one, as my artist friend put it, I can feel its “burn” on my back.  Rothko’s make you think, so does the play, Red.

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