John Logan's "Red' at Suzanne Roberts (1st review)

The best artists are those who read a lot, my art director at the old Welcomat, Susan McAninley, used to say. "Reading provides context and reference points," she explained. "An artist who doesn't read is just an illustrator."

Susan wasn't thinking specifically of the late and much tormented Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, but she could have been. Rothko received a thorough grounding in the Classics at Yale. "Pollock is emotion," Rothko remarks dismissively of a rival painter in John Logan's Red. "Rothko is intellect." At another point he declares, "Most of painting is thinking. Ten per cent is putting paint on canvas. The rest is waiting."

But if Logan's portrayal is correct, Rothko was one artist who read and thought maybe a little too much. Great artists often make insufferable human beings because they're fixated on an inner vision that no one else perceives. (Think of the jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, driven to an early grave by his obsession with hitting a note that didn't exist.)

Rothko's insufferability, by contrast, derives from the awesome challenge of vying with all the great thinkers and painters who preceded him. Hemingway once remarked that the most terrifying thing he ever confronted was "a blank sheet of paper," but to Rothko "it's facing Manet or Velasquez."

Four Seasons dilemma

This is a man who paints for posterity— not for fame or fortune or a moment's popularity. "I am here to stop your heart!" he shouts. "I am here to make you think— not to paint pretty pictures."

Rothko's partners in this enterprise are not fallible human gallery owners or collectors or critics but the colors of his paintbrush, especially the color red. "The only thing I fear," he says, "is the day the black will swallow the red." Rothko's best friends, it appears, are his paintings, which, he knows, will "live or die in the eye of the sensitive viewer."

Red invites us into Rothko's New York studio at a critical moment for the artist and his paintings— the late 1950s, when Rothko accepted a commission to paint seven murals for the elegant Four Seasons restaurant atop the architect Philip Johnson's gleaming new Seagram Building on Park Avenue. The gig will bring Rothko money and recognition, but it will also condemn his paintings to the companionship of Philistine business executives— more interested in meals and deals than reds and blacks.

This dilemma unfolds through Rothko's relationship with Ken, his young and innocent assistant— a familiar and, to my taste, overused theatrical device: The naÓ¯f in effect becomes a convenient stand-in for the equally naÓ¯ve audience— a blank canvas through which we can learn about Rothko without admitting our own ignorance.

Flesh-and-blood trauma

The trouble with this gimmick is that it precludes the sort of intellectual fireworks that might occur between sophisticated equals. (Think, for example, of the two-hour conversation between the actor Andre Gregory and the writer Wallace Shawn in My Dinner With Andre.) When Rothko browbeats his terrified assistant about "the importance of seriousness," I found myself yearning for some character with the balls and experience to reply, "Cut the shit, Mark. In all your voluminous reading, did you never stumble upon La Rochefoucauld? You know— the French enlightenment thinker who observed, "'The man who lives free from folly is not so wise as he thinks'?"

As it happens, in Red Rothko's mishigoss pales beside Ken's: When Ken was a small boy, his parents were murdered by a home intruder. Here is an opportunity for a truly dramatic psychological confrontation: Rothko's creative trauma vs. Ken's flesh-and-blood trauma. But Ken's revelation gives Rothko barely five seconds' pause before he resumes his rants about his sufferings at the hands of an unappreciative world.

At last, a grownup

Instead the climax of Red, such as it is, occurs when Rothko telephones Philip Johnson to say he won't give his paintings to the Four Seasons after all, and that he's returning his lucrative fee. To Logan this is a statement of artistic courage in a materialistic world, which of course it is. But to my mind the more intriguing potential drama of this moment, which Logan fails to plumb, lies in the fact that this call constitutes Rothko's first onstage interaction with a grownup who must deal with the real world.

The implied message of Rothko's call to Johnson is: "I'm sorry to inconvenience you, but hey— I'm Mark Rothko. Get over it!" It never occurs to Rothko that other people (even great architects like Johnson) have issues just as he does; all that matters is what's being done to him and his precious paintings.

(The late Penn sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, the pre-eminent scholar of America's WASP upper class, was fond of noting the essential difference between the Puritans who founded Harvard and the Congregationalists who founded Yale: "Yale men were preoccupied with what they were doing to the world; Harvard men, with what the world was doing to them." Rothko presumably dropped out of Yale before getting the message.)

Unanswered questions

Rothko spent most of the '60s searching for a suitable home for those murals he'd created for the Four Seasons; after he finally found a refuge, at the Tate Gallery in London in 1970, he killed himself. Had Rothko concluded that his work was finished? Was he a mad genius who could no longer suffer the world's company? Both?

For all his intellectual firepower, Rothko failed to perceive the power of great art to change the world— which to my mind was his real tragedy. Those business-suited yahoos dining in the Four Seasons, once exposed to his murals, might have been sensitized far more profoundly than the already sensitized art lovers who routinely flock to the Tate Gallery. An exchange between Rothko and, say, Philip Johnson, might have brought out that point.

Logan's play, whatever its dramatic shortcomings, provides rich and ample food for thought about the role of the artist in society. It's a rare attempt to dramatize the creative process through some vehicle other than a show about putting on a show. (In perhaps the play's most compelling scene, Rothko and his assistant actually fill a huge canvas with red paint.) Stephen Rowe, as Rothko in the Philadelphia Theatre Company's current production, makes a compellingly unrepentant grouch of a genius. You leave Red hungry to spend more time contemplating Rothko's work, and convinced that 90 minutes in this unhappy man's company will suffice for eternity.♦


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