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by John Logan, directed by Kim Collier

Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

November 24-December 17, 2011

“The Red and the Black”

The Canadian Stage production of John Logan’s play Red is stimulating on every level--intellectually, dramatically and visually.  This perfectly reflects a play whose subject matter is painting and the meaning of art in general.  Add to this a magnificent performance by Jim Mezon as the painter Mark Rothko and Red is unmissable.

Writing plays about the creation of art is notoriously difficult and tend to be reductively biographical.  Playwright John Logan--now better known as the screenwriter of such films as Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and Hugo--has kept all talk of biography to a minimum.  We hear only that Rothko (1903-70) was born to a Russian-Jewish family as Marcus Rothkowitz and emigrated from Russia to the U.S. when he was 11.  We hear nothing of his family, his two wives or children.  Logan keeps the focus of the play solely on art and the importance of art in Rothko’s life.

The setting is Rothko’s studio in New York City minutely recreated in all its chaos by designer David Boechler.  The time is 1958-59 when Rothko was working on a his largest project ever: a set of murals to be hung in a space designated for them--the Four Seasons restaurant in the newly completed Seagram Building designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.  The building proved widely influential in American architecture and is still there as is the restaurant. 

Logan’s fiction is that Rothko (Jim Mezon) hires an assistant Ken (David Coomber), a painter just out of art school, to help him with this massive project.  Although Rothko views Ken strictly as an employee and gofer, and not as an apprentice, Rothko’s nature is such that he pontificates at the slightest provocation.  And Ken’s general ignorance of both life and art provide constant provocation.  As time progresses with each of the play’s scenes the timid, awkward Ken increasing gains confidence to argue points with Rothko and assert that the master’s view of the world and his work has its own flaws and contradictions.  In this way, Logan gives the highly intellectual discussions of art and philosophy dramatic thrust.  Logan basically does for art history and abstract impressionism in Red what Michael Frayn did for quantum physics in Copenhagen.  He’s discover how to make intellectual debate into thrilling, engaging theatre.

Key to the structure of Red is a notion from Nietzsche, a philosopher central to Rothko’s worldview.  It is the duty of each new generation to overthrow the art of the previous generation, but to overthrow it, the new generation must first thoroughly understand it.  Rothko boasts to Ken how he and other Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning trampled the previous movements of Cubism and Surrealism into the ground.  To make his point, Logan condenses time in order to have Rothko attend the famous 1962 International Exhibition of the New Realists, or Pop Art, the movement that would replace Abstract Expressionism, and return in a fit of rage.  “In a hundred years what museum will have Andy Warhol hanging on its walls?” he thunders.  Of course, Ken can point out that Rothko has merely lived long enough to see the next generation destroy its fathers as Rothko said they should. 

Pop Art represents everything that Rothko thinks art is not.  Rothko tries through the interplay of fields of colour to communicate a spiritual experience to the viewer, particularly of life versus its extinction.  Even in working on the Seagram murals he is aware of his greatest fear, that “One day the black will swallow the red”.  What Rothko seeks, and thinks he has found in the Four Seasons, is a chapel where people can contemplate and be transformed by his art.  Ultimately, just such a building, the Rothko Chapel (1971), would be constructed, though Rothko would not live to see it.  Thus, for a man who painted while listening to classical music, the play closes with “In diesen heil'gen Hallen" (“Within these sacred halls”) from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.  

Jim Mezon’s long experience at the Shaw Festival has given him the ability to give passion to the expression of ideas and to makes these ideas absolutely clear.  In the numerous times when he lectures Ken, you feel you in the hands of an ideal teacher.  Art is Rothko’s life and that is exactly what Mezon conveys.  But he is also human and his irascibility, fury, patience and depression are also there.  With his Rothko, Mezon has added yet another to his long list of triumphant performances.

As, director Kim Collier has chosen newcomer David Coomber.  This might seems risky but it proves to be an inspired choice.  Coomber is young enough to be devoid of any “actorly” habits.  This makes him perfect for embodying the freshness and awkwardness of the young man face to face with a giant.  But, just as ken has to assert his own identity versus Rothko, so does Coomber versus Mezon and this his does in a way that captures the sense of daring and rush of new ideas that come to ken when finally has the courage to see the great one’s flaws.  It is an excellent, dynamic pairing.

The transitions between scenes are beautiful.  Boechler’s set is placed at an angle and closed off for set changes by huge sliding doors.  On these Collier has Brian Johnson project animated close-up surveys of Rothko’s paintings so that we literally see the colours live and vibrate as the artist repeatedly describes. For the Pop Art exhibition Collier has a group of screens descend whereon Johnson projects in rapid succession a series of now-familiar images from Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and others, giving them the impact of sensory overload and deliberate crassness that viewers then, like Rothko, must have experienced.   

This is a play that follows Horace’s dictum of old that art should educate as well as delight.  You can’t help but look at things in a new way after seeing it.  Yet, it is so emotionally involving the audience actually cheered when Rothko makes the key decision of the play.  Luckily, Toronto is not the only city that will see this production.  After its run here, is moves on to Vancouver January14 to February 4 and then to Edmonton February 11 to March 4.  A fine work like this in such a fine production should be experienced by as many as possible.                              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Jim Mezon and David Coomber. ©2011 Bruce Zinger.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.