British playwright John Logan subscribes to the view of some influential critics that the murals are masterworks, and so was dismayed by the superficial rejection of the hoi polloi. In his prize-winning play Red, now at Syracuse Stage, Logan argues not only for the murals, which we never see, but for difficult art by difficult people. He is also arguing implicitly for difficult stage plays like his own Red that don’t leave you laughing but do grab you by the throat.
The first two things that strike you about the partially fictionalized portrayal of Mark Rothko (played by Joseph Graves) are that he’s a haughty S.O.B., and you’re not supposed to like him. For all his being a high modernist with a bohemian demeanor, he sees himself as a part of grand Western tradition and takes comfort in listening to classical LPs (the play takes place between 1958 and 1960), his presumed peers. The works of Bach, Christoph Willibald Gluck and Franz Schubert predominate. Give him a little Chet Baker, the populist jazzman, and he recoils.
With all his talk about the need for suffering in order to know what and how to create, he brings echoes of the romantic artists of the early 19th century, like Lord Byron or Hector Berlioz. Then again, his paint-spattered chinos remind us he’s also a working artist struggling to complete a commission from a wealthy patron. The murals are intended for the five-star Four Seasons restaurant in the lush new skyscraper designed by celebrity architects Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, also his peers. For these he is to be paid $35,000.
At the beginning of the action Rothko is hiring an assistant, Ken (Matthew Amendt), initially dressed all wrong, awkward and shy. Assertively uningratiating, Rothko growls, “I’m not your rabbi or your friend. I’m your employer.” Ken’s job is mostly menial, like stretching canvas over frames, which he does in each performance. His first provocative question is, “What do you see?” For the first half-hour Rothko takes next to no interest in Ken, and remains unaware that he is an artist himself, and indifferent that he has a Big Family Secret to be revealed later on. In the meantime Rothko talks. He says that only 10 percent of the work is putting paint on canvas.
To a degree, Red resembles Wallace Shawn’s My Dinner with Andre (filmed in 1981), in that much of the dialogue constitutes an essay on art and life. Andre Gregory, of Dinner, was less significant than Rothko as well as being more congenial. Gregory was also free from the aesthetic dilemmas facing the painter: Why accept the commission at all? Are the paintings only upscale diversions for the pretentious rich? Rothko roars, “I want to create something that will spoil the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who eats in that room.” And, “I am here to stop your heart; I am not here to paint pretty pictures.”
In lines like these we can hear the playwright speaking through the character. For many ticket-holders, going to the theater is simply a night out, an entertainment. “Just give me a good time,” they proclaim. “I see enough pain and disappointment every day without having to pay somebody to act it out.” In answer to this, Logan has Rothko recite a litany of denunciation against settling for just being “fine.” Logan also has Rothko plunging into Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in deciding how he wants to balance his colors. Completing the murals becomes literally a matter of life and death.
Another difference from My Dinner with Andre is that the younger man is more than a passive listener. As Ken gets his footing, and begins to look more like Rothko, he becomes something like a goad. His weapons are drawn from Rothko’s doubts. After all, if the murals are only decoration in a tony eatery, aren’t they only an ornament of consumption, a decoration, a conspicuous consumer product?
The artist, however, remains secure in his calling: “A restaurant? I will make it a temple!” Making wordplay on this, he later proclaims, “I will be the high priest of art in the temple of consumption.” Additionally, Ken is an artist himself, as Rothko barely acknowledges, and his generation will replace the current one just as Rothko’s “killed” cubism.
Not all of Red is made up of lofty pronouncements, however. If there is something like comic relief, it comes in Rothko’s candid observations about other artists, which may or may not be taken from his actual statements. His dismissal of Andy Warhol sounds anachronistic as the celebrated Campbell soup cans do not appear until three years after the action of Red. There’s nothing comic in his analysis of his contemporary and very serious rival Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), whose willful drunk driving in an Oldsmobile convertible he calls “lazy suicide.”
Program notes tell us Rothko was also a suicide, and not a lazy one. Yet in Logan’s depiction of him, where there is “tragedy in every brush stroke,” he struggles to keep the black from overcoming the red.
Director Penny Metropulos, imported again from Oregon, is strongly in command of the text. Her efforts, plus the expense of bringing actor Joseph Graves all the way from Beijing, pay dividends. They give us an unlovable, uncompromising egotist who wins us to his side. Picking up on all the cues about worship—“priest,” “temple,” “sacrifice”—Metropulos and Graves give us a Rothko who’s a Prophet of Art at the end of the 1950s, and we can believe him.
Matthew Amendt as Ken should not be shorted on the applause, and is more a co-star than a supporting player. Not only is Ken’s arc longer than Rothko’s, but we might not have been able to bear the older artist without what the younger man brings out of him.
Rothko might have worked on the Bowery, but William Bloodgood’s scenic design, complete with huge panels that evoke what the artist was trying to do, are important contributions to the drama. Thomas C. Hase’s lighting guides our eyes in the right direction. Gretchen Darrow-Crotty’s costumes contribute especially to Ken’s changing character.
Like his contemporaries, the ad men in Mad Men, Mark
Rothko smoked all the time. On stage Joseph Graves lights up with
non-carcinogenic fags made with rose hips and marshmallow. They do not
make your eyes water.
This production runs through March 25. See Times Table for information.
Rothko Fever
Mark Rothko. For the next couple of weeks you’ll probably be hearing or reading this name a lot. You recognize it; you might love his work or you might just remember him from that art history class you took in college. Yes, that Mark Rothko, one of the most important American modern artists.
The presentation of Red, a Tony Award-winning play about his life, at Syracuse Stage is why it seems Rothko is everywhere. While the play is mostly fiction, it represents a very specific and real moment of the artist’s life, in fact, one of its most dramatic, according to Luis Castañeda, assistant professor of art history in the department of art and music histories in the College of Arts & Sciences of Syracuse University.
By the late 1950s, when the play is set, Rothko was already a well-known name in the artistic world. Together with Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dar and Willem de Kooning, this group of mostly immigrant artists was starting what is known as abstract expressionism and helping New York City grow into an artistic and cultural center.
This was a tremendously important generation of artists that matured during the late 1950s, when American art came into its own, believes Sascha Scott, also an assistant professor at the department of art and music histories at SU. “Whereas the art before had been really about politics or society, these were artists who were really thinking about the human condition and the place of the human within the world,” she says. These types of concerns likely were an effect of World War II.
The war affected the way art and culture in general were produced, according to Castañeda. “It motivated this kind of search for expressions of spirituality as a way to respond to the traumas of the recent past,” he says. For Rothko this rendered a particular understanding of art and its function.
In a famous quote, spoken during an interview in 1956, Rothko made his approach very clear: “I’m interested in only expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on,” he said. He strived to create intimate experiences between his artwork and the viewer—to connect with any person regardless of class, race or gender, according to Scott. “They really have this atmospheric effect where these fields of color sort of hover and almost glow in this really powerful way,” she says.
While the social and political context of the postwar era influenced his perception of what his art should be, Rothko’s personal life also played an important role. An episode described in Red is one of the best examples of this.
Rothko was working on murals for the Four Seasons restaurant at the newly constructed Seagram building in New York City. “The commission was considered problematic for a number of ways for Rothko,” says Castañeda. “It forced him to look closely at his philosophical principles and his practice as an artist; and in terms of his personal life, it was a rather turbulent moment.” Rothko was having problems with his health and his wife.
Castañeda believes that Rothko intended his art to be contemplated over time to draw out those universal human emotions he talked about, and that he had certain lighting requirements for his paintings to achieve that. These two conditions were not going to be guaranteed at the Four Seasons.
Additionally, “the rise of what was already becoming a relatively visible and well-defined corporate culture collided with the interest of Rothko, who didn’t necessarily see himself as someone who was subscribed to the social or economic base for that culture,” Castañeda says.
At the same time, the issue of social class was also an important factor, according to Stephen Zaima, associate dean for global academic programs and initiatives in the department of art of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at SU.
“Just like with Rothko’s paintings, {the Seagram building} has this purity of modernism in it. It’s a very minimal, very beautifully structured building. Rothko’s paintings seemed to be a good fit in terms of that kind of modernist purity,” Zaima says. But Rothko intended his art to be accessible to all types of people, and the luxurious Four Seasons restaurant wouldn’t allow that.
As a result, Rothko withdrew from the project. What he had completed by that time is now available for public viewing in certain museums like the Tate Modern in London. “Those paintings to some degree give us some sense of the kind of mental state and emotional state in which Rothko found himself at the time,” Castañeda says.
However, if going to London is not on your agenda, you can get an idea of how these paintings looked by the mock-ups used in Red. If you want to experience the real deal, face to face with one of Rothko’s originals, you don’t even have to go all the way to New York City, either. The Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, located at 310 Genesee St. in Utica, owns two original Rothko paintings: “Abstraction Number 11” from 1947 and “Abstraction Number 18” from 1951. For more information, visit mwpai.org.
If what you want is to get a more comprehensive understanding of Mark Rothko as an influential artist in American art, don’t miss the free lecture by Sumi Hayashi presented by the VPA’s department of art. Hayashi is curator of the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in Japan that holds seven of the original Rothko “Seagram Murals.” She co-organized the 2009 Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern and is in the process of translating James Breslin’s Mark Rothko: A Biography first published in 1998. “She is the expert on Rothko in Japan,” Zaima says.
The lecture will be held Tuesday, March 20, 6:30 p.m., at Shemin Auditorium in the Shaffer Art Building on the SU Quad. For more information, call 443-9400.
—Veronica Magan
