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The play Red begins as Mark Rothko stands up, lights a cigarette, and examines his towering, crimson hued painting. His visage contorted with concentration, the epitome of a tortured artist, he is abruptly shaken from reticent trance by his awkward and bumbling teenaged apprentice, played by Eddie Redmayne, whose surfboard stoner accent is out of place in 1950s New York.
Though Alfred Molina’s performance as the painter Rothko is powerful, and his protégé doesn’t do anything markedly to mar the quality of the production, the nature of playwright John Logan’s dialogue grows increasingly stale with every passing minute of the production. Superbly acted, a two-man show nevertheless relies foremost on the development of the exchange. As written, Rothko is too monomaniacal and lacking in dynamic outside the realm of cliché, and there are only so many ways for two actors mired in trite, set-in-stone roles to deliver their lines over the course of 90 minutes. Witty and poignant moments pepper this hour and a half, but seasoning roadkill doesn’t make the last fetid chunks any more pleasant to digest. There is no real, complete digestible story here— just a vague sense that the viewer’s intellect is being flattered, rather than challenged, and a barrage of long winded platitudes and predictable anecdotes, such as “To surmount the past, you must know the past!”
Red is centered on the eventuality of, and the reaction to, the brashness of Rothko’s apprentice as he questions the integrity of Rothko’s artistic theories. If Logan went anywhere further than sticking two gifted actors each in his own respective eggshell, painting the eggshells in grayscale, and mashing them together until cracks began to form, then Red may have come across as something more than a farcical paradox.
Red
John Golden Theater
252 West 45th Street
New York, NY
Through June 27th, 2010
Tags: Alfred Molina, Eddie Redmayne, John Logan, Mark Rothko, painter
Filed Under: Feature Sights
More from Jasper Chisolm!!!!!
June 19, 2010 10:13 am