The George Street Playhouse’s forceful new production of “Red” reminds us what a formidable presence Rothko was. “Everyone likes everything these days,” he complains. “Where’s the discernment?” And the play is set in the late 1950s. Who knows what the man would have thought of early-21st-century standards?
This is a two-man, one-act, one-set play, but it’s far from quiet, reflective “My Dinner With Andre” fare. When Rothko has an opinion, he bellows it. “We are living under the tyranny of time,” he says. (That just about sums it up.) “Nature doesn’t work for me; the light’s not good,” he declares. (All right, that one seems disingenuous.) The object — maybe the victim — of his proclamations is his new assistant, Ken (Randy Harrison).
Rothko’s work matters desperately to him. At one point he tells Ken that selling a painting is like “sending a blind child into a room full of razor blades.” Still, he has agreed to paint murals for a grand new restaurant in New York, the Four Seasons (which, in real life, opened in 1959). A pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, he is, like many (maybe all) artists, disdainful of people who buy art to match their sofas, but he is taking on this commercial assignment with high hopes — and for $35,000, at a time when that would buy you a couple of nice houses.
When “Red” was on Broadway in 2010, with Alfred Molina as Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as the assistant, it was fierce and deeply felt. Ben Brantley, in his review in The New York Times, said of Mr. Molina that “an obsessive lover’s possessiveness and perplexity glitter in this Rothko’s eyes like a fever.”
We don’t really see that in the George Street production, but Bob Ari is a believable Rothko with arrogant authority. It’s not surprising that, with his brute-in-a-suit demeanor, he was an understudy for the role of Richard M. Nixon in the Broadway production of “Frost/Nixon.”
Mr. Harrison, who plays Rothko’s innocent (at first) young assistant, is best known to television viewers as the innocent (at first) male ingénue in the Showtime series “Queer as Folk.” Onstage he captures Ken’s most significant development: finding his voice and eventually switching places emotionally with Mr. Ari’s Rothko. But at a recent performance, the only scene in which the theater grew completely silent and attentive was during Mr. Harrison’s revelation of his character’s early childhood trauma.
Aside from that, the most emotional scene in “Red” — ably directed here by Anders Cato, who most recently did “Circle Mirror Transformation” at George Street — is the one in which Rothko and his assistant furiously, aggressively prime a giant blank white canvas with red paint while intense operatic music on the turntable drives them on. (“Painting is a manly art,” you can imagine their saying in exaggerated deep voices.)
Lee Savage’s set design is convincing as a New York artist’s studio on the Bowery half a century ago, long before the Bowery was cool. As costume designer, Jennifer Moeller has only four outfits to deal with, but dress is crucially important in “Red.” In the beginning, Rothko is in carelessly thrown-together work clothes, and Ken arrives in a suit and tie. At the end, Ken is in a paint-smeared sweatshirt and jeans, and Rothko is wearing a suit, as if he were heading off to a job interview.
But the playwright John Logan’s dialogue makes the same point even more painfully. After working for Rothko for a couple of years, Ken has learned disdain. But then look who he had as a teacher. “I think it’s kind of sentimental to equate black with death,” Ken tells his former mentor. And he observes pointedly: “Tragic, really, to grow superfluous in your own lifetime.”
Rothko died a decade later, in 1970, a suicide.
Written by nome - Edited by Marcy