STAGE: RED’S BOLD STROKES BRING PAINTER TO LIFE
Actors, set design shine in sometimes- uneven adaptation of Stoppard play
RED
When: Until Feb. 4 Where: Playhouse Theatre Tickets: $ 32 to $ 59 from vancouverplayhouse. com or phone 604- 873- 3311
In Playhouse Theatre’s new production of Red, Mark Rothko is a painter of grand themes on massive canvases, as he was in life. He first appears onstage shrouded in cigarette smoke, staring toward the audience at an invisible painting just over our heads. The artist’s whole character manifests in that powerful gaze.
Then we are introduced to the fictional character of Ken, a young artist who has been hired as Rothko’s assistant. He’s a clumsy, idealistic boy who stutters when Rothko drills him about how the canvas makes him feel.
Rothko explains that he’s working on a series of murals that the Seagram corporation will hang in the luxurious Four Seasons Restaurant in New York.
The artist senses that his relevance is decaying and that the commission, the highest paid in history, may be his last chance at legitimacy in his lifetime. Thus the stage is set for a confrontation between serious modernism and gleeful, cheeky post- modernism. But it will take a while before we get there.
The first act shows Rothko at the top of his oratorical game. He dismisses the idea that this commission reduces his art to mere decoration. Instead, he claims that its presence will make the upscale dining room into a temple. He hectors his new apprentice about loving Jackson Pollock, and announces that the young man will never be anything other than an employee. At one point, Ken catches him reciting, “Rothko, Rembrandt, Turner” like a mantra.
Rothko sees himself as an outsider, which lends drama to his obsession with greatness. In the play he tells the story of how he was born in what is now Latvia as Marcus Rothkowitz before immigrating to Portland. He explains that he later changed his name to Rothko because his agent said he had too many Jewish painters, a jokey cover for his fear of being ostracized by an anti- Semitic art world.
The role, which earned Alfred Molina a Tony nomination for its run in London, calls for an actor of girth in both personality and physicality. Jim Mezon fills the shoes well. He has perfected an Eastern European- inflected growl that modulates between dryly comic and terrifying. His square shoulders and bulk give his body a matching animal vigour.
Yet, despite Mezon’s strength, the energy of the first act falters. Most of it is more of a poem about colour than a play. This may be appropriate to Rothko’s paintings, which scorn ideas of traditional representation in favour of fields of pulsating colours, but it doesn’t always make for riveting viewing.
The two characters look at a painting in progress and play a kind of Freudian association game that recalls Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s rhetorical tennis. Red is sunrise. Red is Santa Claus. Red is Satan. As with Rothko’s paintings, however, it’s sometimes hard to tell when the dialogue is being profound and when it’s being pretentious. Playwright John Logan’s words lack Tom Stoppard’s sparkle, making it the actor’s jobs to keep up momentum from one scene to the next. It’s a challenge they don’t always meet.
Ken, played by David Coomber, is fresh- faced but lacking in the youthful exuberance that might provide a counterpoint to Mezon’s heaviness. For most of the first act, he is a sounding board for Rothko’s ideas and tends to disappear into the scenery like another tool on the artist’s overloaded work table.
David Boechler’s impressive set design does its best to make up for the lack of action. A cube made of stacked white canvases opens to reveal a stage turned so that the corner thrusts toward the audience. White- washed brick walls disappear into the rafters giving Rothko’s workspace the look of a cathedral while around the floor, spatters of red that collect throughout the play recall a slaughterhouse. Between scenes the cube closes and projections of pure colour take over the surface, echoing and adding to the drama.
Not until near the end of the first act, however, when Rothko and Ken prime a canvas together with balletic coordination, does the energy of the first moments return. There’s a poignant note of horror when Ken realizes that the drying red paint reminds him of drying blood. But when the young man’s big emotional moment comes in a monologue about his parents’ murder, it comes off as a little too stagy.
Director Kim Collier replaces the intermission with a montage of pop art projected on rectangular canvases. It represents the movement that is biting at Rothko’s heals, a new era of hyper- representation in bold colours with stark lines. Afterward, the artist returns deflated. He has seen what the future holds and he hates it as much as Ken loves it.
Beneath the artist’s theoretical objections lies a fear of obsolescence and death that is far more compelling. At the height of his swagger, Rothko announces that he and his contemporaries destroyed the cubists. He sneers at Picasso signing placemats for money. By the second act he understands that Andy Warhol, Roy Liechtenstein, and even Ken will do the same to him.
The intellectual posturing of the early scenes peels away to reveal a man scrambling to keep his place in the world. Maybe he would have been better off dying young like Pollock, while everyone admired him.
Rothko realizes that this commission is his Waterloo. He can take the money and allow his art to fade into irrelevancy or he can cancel the commission and keep fighting for purity of expression.
Then there’s this young man who is questioning whether everything he stands for even matters. As doubt begins to take over, the energy between the two principles explodes. If only we could have made it there earlier.