Red at Theatre Exile

A man is staring out, past the audience looking at something. We don’t know what. He is the painter, Mark Rothko. In time, we learn that he is looking at a wall in his studio and thinking about the paintings on that wall that he is preparing for the walls of the new Four Seasons Restaurant that will be part the Seagram’s Building that is being erected on Park Avenue by among others, Philip Johnson. The commission for these murals is the largest ever offered to an artist. At the same time, Rothko hires a new young helper, Ken, a budding artist himself, to help with the daily chores at the studio, including putting the undercoat on paintings and making the frames. He also serves as a sounding board as Rothko rants about the art world while challenging and even humiliating Ken.

            Theatre Exile is presenting the play “Red” which first opened in London in 2009. It then came to Broadway the following year with the same leads, Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne- it won six Tony Awards. Exile’s performers are Scott Greer and Zach Valdez who under the fine direction of Matt Pfeiffer, give outstanding performances. Nevertheless, the play did not appeal to me.

            When I think of Rothko, I see the large canvases with huge blocks of color.  He was an abstract expressionist but if you asked him, he would deny being branded by any art movement. In fact, he would deny almost everything you say about him, about art, about any and everything. And as Ken tries to get to know Rothko and his beliefs, he is dismissed by the artist in an obnoxious and cruel manner. He is a know-it-all snob.

            He tells Ken that he will never amount to anything because he is not civilized until he learns of the great poets, philosophers, and historians like Nietzsche, Sophocles, Byron and a dozen others. Rothko, who compares himself to Rembrandt, never even looks at the paintings of the young man. In two years, he asks the young man nothing about himself.

            Meanwhile, with Ken’s assistance, he is preparing many of the canvases with red paint, thus the title of the play. He hates the color black because it implies death to his ideas and to art itself. He feels that his colors evoke a certain resonance of emotion that are a unique language of their own. He scowls at the comic book art of Roy Lichtenstein and the Pop Art of Andy Warhol and his soup cans. He can’t accept any modern art or artists of the day. That is what turns out to be the crux of the story- the older generation not accepting the ideas and the art of a younger, new generation.

            It’s a talky play. Scott Greer as Rothko is superbly obnoxious. But it is tiring to listen to the ranting. We find ourselves looking at Ken (who is never named in the play) to see his reactions to it all and we feel for him. Though I can’t imagine a better production of this play by John Logan, I felt like I was at a lecture rather than in the audience of an interesting or entertaining drama. It isn’t what I go to the theater for.

“Red” by John Logan at Theatre Exile, 1340 S. 13^th St., Philadelphia, PA 19147, 215-218-4022,  boxoffice@theatreexile.org   Thru November 10, 2024