Red: but then art happened
5 Apr 2025 - Photos by Damon McLean

What do you see? You must get close. Let it pulsate. Let it work on you. Let it wrap its arms around you. Embrace you so that nothing else exists. Let it do its work.

Esteemed painter Mark Rothko (Lindsay Merrithew) is struggling to train his new assistant to appreciate just how deep and meaningful Rothko's paintings are. Not only does the unnamed assistant, played by Brendan Kinnon (Suddenly Last Summer), get a lecture on art appreciation, he also gets advice, abuse, a treatise on colour, physical labour, and sermons on the value of art, specifically the horrors of art and artists becoming commodities. When the assistant asks if all artists should starve, Rothko snaps back with a resonant "Yes" followed by an equally resonant "All except me." Rothko's lectures are filled with references that were current for the late '50s: painters, philosophers, and works of art. He is appalled that the assistant is not familiar with all, he believes that being educated is essential to being human. And to being able to fully understand a painting. The two concepts are, to Rothko, interchangeable.

Rothko is working on a series of large murals that are to hang in the new upscale Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram building. It is an historical curiosity as to why Rothko was given the commission because, as he emotes in Red, his work is about basic human emotions, predominantly tragedy, and, being an abstract expressionist working on a grandiose scale, the works are not background material. Rothko despairs that they are meant to be "the world's most expensive over mantels." He doesn't want to decorate a restaurant full of "the chattering of monkeys, the barking of jackals," he wants to "stop your heart, make you think." He describes his work using variations of the word "pulsate," a habit the assistant appropriates. Rothko is also delighted to have been instrumental is the "crushing" of cubism and surrealism which were the trendy styles before abstract expressionism. His world is rocked when the assistant begins to explore, and admire, pop art which is poised to crush Rothko and his contemporaries. As the assistant says, "The barbarians are at the gate and people like the barbarians." But what if Rothko is not ready to pass the torch?

John Logan (Penny Dreadful) has written a play of ideas that is a raucous ode to the power of art and the high drama and pressure of trying to create art. Merrithew has a grand time as the lion in winter, wrapping his Shakespearean tone around the flood of monologue, punctuating often with a Bette Davis cigarette. He expounds and spouts invective, leavening it with an occasional twinkle in his eyes to let us know he is well aware that he is deliberately provocative. He insists that the assistant is just an "employee" but also lets us see that he takes his role as mentor and defender of art seriously. Kinnon's role is trickier as he is mostly called on to react to Merrithew. And to simmer under the relentless attacks. He gets to shine in an overwroughtly written back story and finally, when he is forced to speak up. Director Kenzia Dallie sets the two-hander in a messy working studio setting. Canvases are stretched and paint is applied, demonstrating that it is actual labour to translate an idea, emotions, into a work of art. All while making sure that the work that went into creating the realism of Red doesn't show. The metaphor remains subtle and only becomes clear in the hyper-theatrical climax.

There are many delicate theatrical touches in this production. The murals are purportedly hung where the audience is seated, allowing Merrithew and Kinnon to approach right to the edge of the fourth wall as they study the paintings and we study them. The paintings on stage are by Ian Harper who does miniature Rothkos accurately. Rothko's constant cigarettes are lit by use of an elegant lighter, whereas the assistant, in emulation of Rothko, lights his cigarette with a matchbook. A much cheaper and ancient tool used by a proponent of the new and upcoming. Art just might be somewhat resistant to trends. Rothko claims he wants to "ruin the appetite" of those who dine under his murals, the assistant counters with the observation that in painting the murals "art happened because that's what you do." Red is similar, Logan wants us to think about art, to confront our mortality and demons by looking closely, but, then art happened. Because that's what theatre does.