You don’t have to know a thing about modern art to appreciate Red, at the George Street Playhouse through Feb. 26. But in the course of this powerful drama, you’ll get a glimpse of Abstract Expressionism through the distorted lens of painter Mark Rothko — a most intimidating iconoclast.   

John Logan conceived this play after encountering Rothko’s Seagram murals at London’s Tate Gallery. There they hang, alone and divorced from their original purpose as dining-room decorations for the then-newly opened Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building. What kind of man completes a coveted commission, then withdraws the work and returns the money?

Logan built his fiction around what led to this bold stroke. The play is not so much about painting as it is about mentorship. George Street’s artistic director David Saint feels the play is particularly appropriate for this season honoring his own late mentor, Arthur Laurents. When the mentor is a genius, there are rewards and frustrations. In the end, lives are changed forever.    

Although the painter had studio assistants, in reality they were purely utilitarian. The relationship that Logan creates between Rothko (Bob Ari) and his helper Ken (Randy Harrison) is an intense battle of wills. The dramatic arc proceeds as the aspiring young artist is annealed in the great painter’s heat of arrogant self-regard.   

We come to understand Rothko’s art through his contempt for the consumerist culture of mid-20th-century America. When Ken enters the studio to interview for the job, Rothko directs him to look at a painting in progress. “What do you see?” he challenges. Ken’s timid response elicits an angry lecture about the abysmal ignorance of his young viewer, about the lassitude of the masses. “ ‘Pretty.’ ‘Beautiful.’ ‘Nice.’ ‘Fine.’ That’s our life now!” he fumes. “We’re a smirking nation, living under the tyranny of ‘fine.’ ... We are not fine.”    

This is the heart of Rothko’s work, of what he is trying to do against all odds that viewers will get it. There should be a prolonged dialogue between the viewer and canvas. You must bring something to the painting. Despite the apparent simplicity —large fields of single colors on enormous canvases — much is going on that requires concentration. It is not for the casual viewer. What is eventually perceived has come from a place of deep personal turmoil.   

Rothko is a bully, an anti-sentimentalist, a pessimistic idealist, contrary and contradictory. He boasts that his generation killed Cubism. “The child must banish the father.” Picasso is now a joke, earning thousands for hasty scribbles. Jackson Pollock’s action painting simply fuels his passion for convertibles. Rothko harangues Ken about the early days. There were no galleries, no critics, no money, no mentors, no parents (“We were alone”). He wears his alienation like a badge. Ironically, as Ken points out, Rothko himself is now among the most valued and valuable artists.

Early in his assistantship, Ken is subservient and dutiful. He heeds Rothko’s warning that he is a mere employee. Opinions will not be solicited. “You should be so blessed I talk to you about art,” Rothko says. He will not be a parental figure or a counselor. In this space only Rothko’s ideas matter, only his records are permitted on the gramophone. The man’s obstinacy and bombast are at times quite comic. The play is sprinkled with amusing dialog that leavens such an otherwise overbearing character.   

But as the work proceeds, Ken opens up, relating his personal history and become more involved. But he knows enough to react properly to what he sees now — how colors create a dynamic tension and induce in the viewer discomforting anxiety or spiritual awe. These are no static daubs. Rothko explains that creating art involves mostly looking and thinking.    

As Ken becomes emboldened to mention new artists he has seen — Andy Warhol and his soup cans, Roy Lichtenstein and his comics — the dynamic shifts. Rothko’s dismissal of the new is occasion to point out his hypocrisy. The problem of the Seagram commission and its purpose looms large. The growth in this play is of a young painter, struggling against the world made by a giant who in his turn struggled against the giants of his own now-long-gone youth.   

Ari’s Rothko is wonderfully blunt and arrogant — even rude. He shows the painter as a thinker whose craft serves the ideas. Painting is no longer “about” something. It creates what the viewer lets it. He is certainty and self-doubt bound together. While he in effect mentors, he himself is being schooled. Harrison’s Ken is the perfect complement. At first obsequious, he grows throughout the play. Eventually he and his mentor prove a combustible mixture. Their exchanges are always tension filled, anticipating ... what?    

This is an utterly absorbing 90 minutes of crackling dialog and, yes, some brief, frenzied action. Ari and Harrison are riveting in their roles. What’s more, it whets the appetite for seeking out the nearest Rothko (“I’m a noun?!”) to contemplate the meaning of life in its presence.