First I liked it, then I thought, nyah-nyah, and now, two days later, I can’t get it out of my head. Sure sign it’s a good play.
It’s a rant punctuated by long silences, with a bloody, gutsy, painful recollection in the middle of it. Rothko’s assistant is doing the talking while he mops up the red paint on the floor. If you’ve ever felt frustrated because nobody has a definition of art, go see this play, pay attention and when the boy mops up the red stuff, don’t think for a minute this scene is about making the stage floor neat and safe. That scene is the core of this play. If you get it, you’re not likely to feel the need for a definition of art again.
“Red” is a one-and-a-half hour play without intermission in which Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is portrayed at work and arguing with his new assistant, a young artist, who is excoriated by Rothko because he hasn’t read Nietzsche. “What do they teach you in art school!” Indeed.
Since the proscenium forms the fourth wall of the studio which presumably would be covered by paintings-in-progress, it happens more than once that Rothko and the assistant stand facing that “wall” with Rothko asking “what do you see?” Of course, he’s asking us. The silences in this play are important. Rothko tells the assistant, 10% of the work is spent actually painting, the rest is thinking, looking, meditating. The audience was not fidgety. The silences really were silent. There was much to absorb.
The last day to see “Red” by John Logan at the Goodman Theater will be a week from now, Sunday, October 30. http://www.goodmantheatre.org/
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 
In addition to everything you said, there are aspects of the staging that fascinated me.
Almost every scene contains a Rothko work in progress on the ‘back wall’ of the studio. The stage lighting often makes the work in progress radiant and it glows right off the canvas, inviting the audience’s contemplation.
Two other things, the clothing and music, hinted at a cultural changing of the guard, or at least the contrast of different generations with different priorities regarding art.
The assistant’s clothing, from scene to scene, follows a pretty consistent progression from formal to informal. He progresses from suit and dress shirt, to casual shirt, to tee shirt, in the final scene, wearing a sleeveless undershirt. Is it just a sign of the more casual generation to come? (this IS taking place during the late 1950’s) A sign that the assistant is feeling more comfortable in his skin? Or is it just a sign of how much work is done by assistants to major artists?
When Rothko is meditating on a work in progress, you hear Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Beethoven, quintessential meditation music to my mind. Later in one scene, the assistant is working and is listening to a Coltrane jazz recording on the record player; it was a shock to my ear as well as a shock to Rothko when he walks in and hears it. What was interesting to me is that I find Coltrane ‘contemplative’ as well, not in the formal structured way of Bach, but in more free-floating unstructured progressions. But was this another cultural collision between the two generations?
I agree, the set drew us in and made the work immediate and also the work process. The scene where they both paint that huge canvas was gripping. I also agree about the use of music (I knew it was Bach, but surely not a variation on Beethoven who comes much later). It should give us pause, to think that Rothko, who seemed and still seems so revolutionary, thought of himself as grounded in the history of ideas. When the kid pun on Contrane, the sound did seem jarring, which is odd, because Rothko and Contrane were contemporaries.