If you are interested in art, if you respond to intellectual depth, and fine acting, then you will be rewarded.

Theater Review—

Award-Winning ‘Red’

Is Being Given First-Rate Treatment In Hartford

By Julie Stern

HARTFORD  — When it premiered on Broadway in 2010, John Logan’s RED garnered a host of prestigious prizes including a Tony for Best Drama, and Drama Desk, Outer Critic Circle and Drama League awards.

One of the points in this two character discussion about the responsibility of the artist to himself, his work, and his posterity, is that people often like what they’re told to like, without any genuine understanding or appreciation. It is possible that the same caveat can be applied to the play itself. Knowing that it is so highly regarded, I suspect that some people will sit through a play about the inner struggles of an abstract expressionist whose work they are unfamiliar with, and listen to a Socratic dialogue about the interplay between the Apollonian and Dionysian elements as described by Nietzsche in his essay “The Birth of Tragedy,” and be impressed because they’re supposed to be impressed.

This is not meant as a put-down of the play. Rather I just wonder if everyone in the audience really “gets it” or even enjoys it.

That said, it is definitely a meaty, intellectual piece of theater, and the current Hartford Theaterworks production under the direction of Tazewell Thompson has some fine acting and staging to show it at its best.

Mark Rothko came to America as a ten-year-old in 1913, to escape the tyranny and anti-Semitism of czarist Russia. He joined his family in Portland, Oregon, where he worked in factories while he went to school. Clearly brilliant, he was given a scholarship to Yale, a place he hated for its snobbish stuffy elitism.

Dropping out after two years he gravitated to New York where he worked in the garment district. A chance encounter with the Art Students League gave him the idea of becoming an artist. In the 1920s and 30s he was part of a group of young painters who saw themselves as rebelling against traditional American realism. By turns he was influenced by German Expressionism, Surrealism, Romanticism and Primitivism as he searched for ways to fill what he felt was a spiritual void in modern culture.

Thus  his paintings went from seascapes and mythological surrealism to expressionistic statements and even experiments in primitivism, all as he was gaining more and more recognition as an important figure in the art world. He was profoundly troubled by the rise of Nazism and the coming of World War II, and it was this, along with his reading of Nietzsche, that turned him to a new direction involving huge canvases consisting of large blocks of color — the dark encroaching on the red, as death and nihilism threatens spiritual life.

By this time he started to become obsessive about his paintings, demanding that viewers must stand so close to them that they feel surrounded by the color, and so begin to be impacted by the art.

The play is set in 1958, when Rothko, now very famous in the art world, has been commissioned to create a series of murals to decorate a new restaurant, and for this purpose he has hired a young art student to be his assistant, there to mix paint, wash brushes, sweep the studio and put on the base coat.

The restaurant is the exclusive Four Seasons, the showpiece of the ultra modern Seagrams Building designed by Mies van der rohe and Phillip Johnson, for the Seagrams whiskey family. In short, the work of this proud, private, highly intellectual artist is going to be displayed as background to the eating habits of a bunch of plutocrats and philistines.

The play revolves around the prickly relationship between the irascible Rothko, and Ken, the young art student who begins as a timid disciple and in the course of two years emerges as an antagonist, challenging  what he sees as Rothko’s willingness to prostitute his art for the sake of a sizeable commission. In the course of this 85-minute no intermission play, there is much discussion about what it means to be an artist, his place in the continuum of history, the necessity of his egoism, and the meaning of the specific “Rothko” works as they appear on stage. These are reproductions of genuine Rothko works, and listening to Jonathan Epstein, as the artist, is like having a very good docent explain what abstract expressionism is doing.

Epstein is terrific. He plays the artist as crochety, self-absorbed, chain-smoking, paranoid, and totally insensitive to anyone’s feelings but his own, while at the same time hauntingly vulnerable in his total commitment to his art, and his need to be understood.

Thomas Leverton is sweetly effective as Ken, who can finally explode after two years and say “you don’t know anything about me, you don’t know if I’m married, if I’m gay, you’ve never seen any of my work,” who goes on to challenge Rothko’s hypocrisy.

This is not a play for everyone (and parents should note that children under the age of 12 aren’t even allowed in to see it), but if you do go, know what to expect. If you are interested in art, if you respond to intellectual depth, and fine acting, then you will be rewarded. If you are an artist, or know any artists, there may be added recognition as well.

(Performances continue until May 6.

See the Enjoy Calendar, in print and online, for curtain, tickets and contact information.)