I think of my pictures as dramas… They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame. Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space. — Mark Rothko, 1947
At the 1971 dedication of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Dominique De Menil, a major French-American art collector of the 20th century and philanthropist, talked about Mark Rothko’s creative courage. De Menil, the patron who commissioned one of the foremost creators in American Abstract Expressionism to make paintings for the chapel, said, “We are cluttered with images and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine,” noting how the artist had managed to paint “impenetrable fortresses of color.” Unfortunately, Rothko had ended his life several months before the paintings were installed in the chapel.
Throughout Rothko’s life and certainly continuing decades after his death, the greatest drama surrounding his life and work has been legions of critics who spared no words in labeling the artist as mediocre and so limited in his figurative talents that he had to compensate by focusing on the abstract. Many of those same critics claimed their judgments had been vindicated because even in the realm of abstract art, Rothko found no happiness and satisfaction in his life— an unjustly brutal judgment by any metric. They saw the abstract as totally vapid, refusing to acknowledge the possibility of pristine beauty emerging in the viewer’s interpretation.
In John Logan’s Red, an exceptional two-hander about the artist set in the late 1950s when he was commissioned to produce murals for the new Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan’s Seagram Building, the reverberations from that great confounding drama which bedeviled the artist throughout his life propel the narrative, in interactions with his studio assistant over the course of two years.
With incredibly sensitive performances that elucidate the finer philosophical and intellectual points of the script, Tyson Baker as Rothko and Amona Faatau as his assistant deliver on Red’s rigorous demands in a new collaboration of Sackerson and Lil Poppet Productions. Directed by Morag Shepherd, the production’s brilliance comes through in its staging in an art studio located in Westminster University’s Converse Hall.
Baker channels convincingly what we already know about the conflicting emotions the artist expressed about the Four Seasons commission. In some ways, he felt he finally was being recognized for his merit over the likes of Jackson Pollock, whose own celebrity status appeared to compensate for his transparent transition to Abstract Expressionism. Rothko eventually produced 40 paintings in dark reds and browns.
Even better, Baker channels the spot-on disdain for critics, the public and others who disparage the abstract or those who are intellectually bereft in sitting long enough with the work to meditate and find their own meaningful connection. In fact, while on a cruise traveling to Europe, he told John Fischer, publisher of Harper’s magazine, that he said he was painting the murals specifically to “ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t. People can stand anything these days.”
However, visiting the Michelangelo room in the San Lorenzo library in Florence, Rothko found the inspiration to continue the murals, hoping to replicate how someone would feel being trapped in a room with the doors and windows walled in and shut. Now convinced that his work could not be displayed in a luxury restaurant, he abruptly returned whatever advance he had received for the commission, to the shock of the Seagram Building owners. Paintings of the final series of Seagram Murals now hang in London’s Tate Modern, Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
None of the archival records confirm why he suddenly decided not to continue. Of course, in Red, this justifies the artistic license taken with this particular episode in Rothko’s life. Hence, Baker presents what one can assume is a realistic interpretation of Rothko’s temperamental personality.
Meanwhile, Faatau excels just as affirmatively, in portraying Rothko’s assistant. Anticipating the professional interaction of working with a major artist, the young assistant is dutiful and willing to undertake the artist’s arduous process along with the mentor’s relentless combative emotions. Rothko typically applied the paint in several layers of fast strokes, using brick and deep reds, along with deep mauves. He would supervise the process which progressed at a near-glacial pace. This newest production of Red does a fine job at recreating what surely was a process that verged on constant torment where the ultimate outcome did not necessarily elicit a gratifying sense that something beautiful had just been created on canvas.
The most fascinating dynamic occurs in the subtly evolving roles of self-confidence where Faatau eventually switches places, with Rothko feeling envious of his assistant’s still-intact idealism about a creator’s authentically expressed identity. Rothko was nearing 60 at this point, and often raged about the younger generation being nothing more than charlatans and commercial opportunists. Visiting a Pop Art show in 1962, Rothko said publicly, “Are the young artists plotting to kill us all?”
The end of Red, a six-time Tony Award winning play that premiered in London in 2009, sets the stage for the extraordinary process that led to the chapel, the final project of Rothko’s life. This wonderful collaborative production situates the play beautifully in the ideals of emotional intimacy and taking a memory to experience a particular emotion. Set aside momentarily the art critics and their debate over Rothko which continues more than 55 years after the artist’s suicide.
Many musicians of different styles have connected with the artistic intentions of Rothko’s most famous creation. One of the first was the distinguished American composer Morton Feldman, whose Rothko Chapel piece stands out as one of the greatest pieces of minimalism, comprising a funereal melody set on viola, celeste chimes and a choir’s block chords. Peter Gabriel wrote Fourteen Black Paintings in 1992, after visiting the chapel. Loren Connors composed blues pieces for guitar. More recently, Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) pays homage to precisely the enveloping sense of being in the chapel, which Rothko had originally imagined.
For one of the most intellectually challenging and engaging independent theatrical productions of the year, this rendering of Red by Sackerson and Lil Poppet Productions is highly recommended. The run continues through April 26. For tickets, see this link.