“Silence is so accurate,” sighs Mark Rothko, brought to bombastic life by Jim Mezon in John Logan’s Tony Award-winning Red. It is one of the more affecting statements from an otherwise gasbag of a character—but then, that’s what Mark Rothko was, an eloquent blowhard who filled his work with thought and theory, each of his late-period multiform paintings pulsing with self-generating light. The speculative point of Logan’s bio-play is that while Rothko searched for inner luminosity, he lived in deep isolation, the inaccuracy of language a way of escaping that painful silence.
Red begins in 1958 with a young man, Ken (a sympathetic David Coomber), entering the mystical, vaguely Kabbalistic micro-world of Rothko’s studio to assist him in a $35,000 commission for the Seagram Building: a series of red murals that will decorate a swank restaurant. Rothko makes quick work of quashing any illusions that Ken might have: “I am not your rabbi, I am not your father, I am not your friend,” he says, all business.
Logan’s Rothko speaks in fully formed paragraphs, tossing out words like “effulgence” as casually as hello. While the text doesn’t leave much to the imagination, Jim Mezon goes to town on it, inhabiting Rothko with outstanding energy and infusing the character’s voice with the shtetl tones of the artist’s youth. Eyes popping, face scarlet with indignation, he lectures Ken on the workings of a painting: “Movement is life. The second we’re born, we squall, we writhe, we squirm,” he says, moments after telling him to expect no lessons from him.
If the play feels weighed down by the not-so-stealth lesson in aesthetics, Collier’s lively staging helps ease the fact that in two years of work, the most labour we see is the priming of a canvas, an energizing spectacle that has Mezon and Coomber feverishly painting to Mozart’s String Quartet no. 17. Equally exciting is David Boechler’s soaring set: an airless loft with whitewashed windows, gated within four sliding canvas panels that open and close around the writhing, squalling, Rothko.
And while movement and life is gratuitously discussed, the character of Ken has very little real substance. With the exception of an eleventh-hour speech in which Ken tells his reluctant mentor just how blind he is, Logan, and consequently, Rothko, makes a straw man of the poor apprentice. Coomber, who last year gave a thoughtful, unguarded performance in Jordan Tannahill’s Post Eden, is a bit squandered in Collier’s otherwise spare production; when (spoiler alert!) he psychodramatically reveals his parents’ murder, it’s so contrived as to be nearly absurd. Ken becomes the scenery that gets chewed up in the monument to Rothko’s unquiet genius.
RED by John Logan; directed by Kim Collier; sets and costumes by David Boechler; lighting by Alan Brodie; music composed by Andy Creeggan. At the Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front St. E. Through December 17. Running time: 90 minutes. Tickets and info: canadianstage.com; 416.368.3110.
WITH: Jim Mezon (Mark Rothko) and David Coomber (Ken).
Naomi Skwarna is Toronto Standard’s theatre critic. Follow her on Twitter at @awomanskwarned.
