RED

A PLAY BY

JOHN LOGAN

Characters

MARK ROTHKO

KEN

Setting

Rothko's studio, 222 Bowery, New York City. Circa 1958-1959.

Rothko's studio is an old gymnasium. The hardwood floor is splattered and stained with hues of dark red paint. There is a cluttered counter or tables filled with buckets of paint, tins of turpentine, tubes of glue, crates of eggs, bottles of Scotch, packets of pigment, coffee cans filled with brushes, a portable burner or stovetop, and a phone. There is also a phonograph with messy stacks of records.

There is one door leading to an unseen vestibule where the characters change into their work clothes and enter and exit the studio.

Most importantly, representations of some of Rothko's magnificent Seagram Mural paintings are stacked and displayed around the room. Rothko had a pulley system that could raise, lower and display several of the paintings simultaneously. The paintings could be repositioned throughout the play, with a different arrangement for each scene.

There is also an imaginary painting "hanging" right in front of the audience, which Rothko studies throughout the play.

Alternately, the entire setting could be abstract.

SCENE ONE

ROTHKO stands, staring forward.

He is looking directly at the audience. (He is actually studying one of his Seagram Mural paintings, which hangs before him.)

Pause.

ROTHKO lights a cigarette. He wears thick glasses and old, ill-fitting clothes spattered with specks of glue and paint.

Contemplative classical music is playing on a phonograph.

ROTHKO takes a drag on his cigarette. Pause.

There is the sound of a door opening and closing from the unseen entry vestibule offstage.

KEN, a man in his early 20s, enters nervously. He wears a suit and tie. This is the first time he has been in the studio. He looks around.

He is about to speak.

ROTHKO gestures for him not to speak. Then he beckons for KEN to join him.

KEN goes to ROTHKO, stands next to him.

ROTHKO indicates the central painting; the audience.

ROTHKO: What do you see?

KEN is about to respond –  

ROTHKO: Wait. Stand closer. You’ve got to get close. Let it pulsate. Let it work on you. Closer. Too close. There. Let it spread out. Let it wrap its arms around you; let it embrace you, filling even your peripheral vision so nothing else exists or has ever existed or will ever exist. Let the picture do its work – But work with it. Meet it halfway for God’s sake! Lean forward, lean into it. Engage with it!… Now, what do you see? – Wait, wait, wait!  

He hurries and lowers the lighting a bit, then returns to KEN.  

ROTHKO: So, now, what do you see? – Be specific. No, be exact. Be exact – but sensitive. You understand? Be kind. Be a human being, that’s all I can say. Be a human being for once in your life! These pictures deserve compassion and they live or die in the eye of the sensitive viewer, they quicken only if the empathetic viewer will let them. That is what they cry out for. That is why they where created. That is what they deserve… Now… What do you see?  

Beat.  

KEN: Red.  

ROTHKO: But do you like it?  

KEN: Mm.  

ROTHKO: Speak up.  

KEN: Yes.  

ROTHKO: Of course you like it – how can you not like it?! Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the soda pop and the shampoo and the Cracker Jack. Everything becomes everything else and it’s all nice and pretty and likable. Everything is fun in the sun! Where’s the discernment? Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has…listen to me now…significance.

ROTHKO moves and turns up the lights again, although he keeps them relatively low, and then switches off the record player, as he continues.  

ROTHKO: Maybe this is a dinosaur talking. Maybe I’m a dinosaur sucking up the oxygen from you cunning little mammals hiding in the bushes waiting to take over. Maybe I’m speaking a lost language unknown to your generation. But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse… I mean obviously ROTHKO.  

He stares at KEN, challenging.  

ROTHKO: Do you aspire?  

KEN: Yes.  

ROTHKO: To what? To what do you aspire?  

KEN: I want to be a painter so I guess I aspire to…painting.  

ROTHKO: Then those clothes won’t do. We work here. Hang up your jacket outside. I appreciate you put on your Sunday clothes to impress me, it’s poignant really, touches me, but it’s ridiculous. We work hard here; this isn’t a goddamn Old World salon with tea cakes and lemonade. Go hang up your jacket outside.  

KEN exits to the entry vestibule off stage. He returns without his jacket. Takes off his tie and rolls up his sleeves.  

ROTHKO: Sidney told you what I need here?  

KEN: Yes.  

ROTHKO busies himself, sorting brushes, arranging canvases, etc., as:  

ROTHKO: We start every morning at nine and work until five. Just like bankers. You’ll help me stretch the canvases and mix the paints and clean the brushes and build the stretchers and move the paintings and also help apply the ground color – which is not painting, so any lunatic assumptions you make in that direction you need to banish immediately. You’ll pick up food and cigarettes and anything else I want, any whim, no matter how demanding or demeaning. If you don’t like that, leave right now. Answer me. Yes or no.  

KEN: Yes.  

ROTHKO: Consider: I am not your rabbi, I am not your father, I am not your shrink, I am not your friend, I am not your teacher – I am your employer. You understand?  

KEN: Yes.  

ROTHKO: As my assistant you will see many things here, many ingenious things. But they’re all secret. You cannot talk about any of this. Don’t think I don’t have enemies because I do and I don’t just mean the other painters and gallery owners and museum curators and goddamn-son-of-a-bitch-art-critics, not to mention that vast panoply of disgruntled viewers who loathe me and my work because they do not have the heart, nor the patience, nor the capacity, to think, to understand, because they are not human beings, like we talked about, you remember?  

KEN: Yes.  

ROTHKO: I’m painting a series of murals now – (He gestures all around.) – I’ll probably do thirty or forty and then choose which work best, in concert, like a fugue. You’ll help me put on the undercoat and then I’ll paint them and then I’ll look at them and then paint some more. I do a lot of layers, one after another, like a glaze, slowly building the image, like pentimento, letting the luminescence emerge until it’s done.  

KEN: How do you know when it’s done?

ROTHKO: There’s tragedy in every brush stroke.

KEN: Ah.

ROTHKO: Swell. Let’s have a drink.  

ROTHKO pours two glasses of Scotch. He hands one to KEN.   They drink. KEN is unused to drinking so early in the morning. Beat. ROTHKO stares at him, appraising.  

ROTHKO: Answer me a question… Don’t think about it, just say the first thing that comes into your head. No cognition.  

KEN: Okay.  

ROTHKO: You ready?  

KEN: Yeah.  

ROTHKO: Who’s your favourite painter?  

KEN: Jackson Pollock.

ROTHKO: (Wounded.) Ah.

KEN: Sorry.

ROTHKO: No, no –  

KEN: Let me do it again.  

ROTHKO: No –  

KEN: Come on –  

ROTHKO: No, it’s silly –  

KEN: Come on, ask me again.  

ROTHKO: Who’s your favourite painter?

KEN: Picasso.  

KEN laughs.   ROTHKO  doesn’t. ROTHKO glowers at him. KEN’s laugh dies. ROTHKO roams.  

ROTHKO: Hmm, Pollock… Always Pollock. Don’t get me wrong, he was a great painter, we came up together, I knew him very well.  

KEN: What was he like?

ROTHKO: You read Nietzsche?

KEN: What?

ROTHKO: You ever read Nietzsche? The Birth of Tragedy?  

KEN: No.  

ROTHKO: You call yourself an artist? One can’t discuss Pollock without it. One can’t discuss anything without it. What do they teach you in art school now?  

KEN: I –  

ROTHKO: You ever read Freud?  

KEN: No –  

ROTHKO: Jung?  

KEN: Well –

ROTHKO: Byron? Wordsworth? Aeschylus? Turgenev? Sophocles? Schopenhauer? Shakespeare? Hamlet? At least Hamlet, please God! Quote me Hamlet. Right now.

KEN: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’

ROTHKO: Is that the question?

KEN: I don’t know.

ROTHKO: You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of your art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

KEN: I thought you weren’t my teacher.

ROTHKO: You should be so blessed I talk to you about art.

ROTHKO moves away. Beat.

ROTHKO: How do you feel?

KEN: How do I feel?

ROTHKO indicates the huge mural paintings all around them.

ROTHKO: How do they make you feel?

KEN: Give me a second.

KEN moves to the middle of the room and takes in all the paintings.

ROTHKO: So?

KEN: Give me a second.  

Beat.  

KEN: Disquieted.  

ROTHKO: And?  

KEN: Thoughtful.  

ROTHKO: And?  

KEN: Um… Sad.

ROTHKO: Tragic.

KEN: Yeah.

ROTHKO: They’re for a restaurant.  

KEN: What?  

ROTHKO: They’re for a restaurant.  

ROTHKO smiles. He enjoys this.  

ROTHKO: So I’m minding my own business when Mister Philip Johnson calls me. You know Mister Philip Johnson, the world-renowned architect?  

KEN: Not personally.  

ROTHKO: Of course you don’t know him personally, you don’t know anyone personally. Don’t interrupt. Mister Philip Johnson calls me. He’s designing the new Seagram Building on Park Avenue, he and Mies van der Rohe. These are names with which to conjure, are they not? Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe, titans of their field, revolutionists. Together they are making a building unlike anything the world has yet seen, reflecting the golden ambitions of not only this city and its inhabitants but of all mankind. In this building there is to be a restaurant called the Four Seasons, like the Vivaldi, and on the walls of this restaurant.  

He gestures expansively to his paintings. Beat.

ROTHKO: (Proud.) Thirty-five thousand dollars they are paying me. No other painter comes close.  

KEN is impressed. Thirty-five thousand dollars is a fortune. Call it two million dollars in today’s money.   ROTHKO walks to the center of the room, filling himself with the work.  

ROTHKO: My first murals… Imagine a frieze all around the room, a continuous narrative filling the walls, one to another, each a new chapter, the story unfolding, look and they are there, inescapable and inexorable, like doom.  

KEN: Are these ones done?  

ROTHKO: They’re in process. I have to study them now.  

KEN: Study them?  

ROTHKO: Most of painting is thinking. Didn’t they teach you that? Ten percent is putting paint onto the canvas. The rest is waiting.  

ROTHKO takes in his paintings.  

ROTHKO: All my life I wanted just this, my friend: to create a place… A place where the viewer could live in contemplation with the work and give it some of the same attention and care I gave it. Like a chapel… A place of communion.  

KEN: But…it’s a restaurant.  

ROTHKO: No… I will make it a temple.

Beat.

ROTHKO  is lost in his paintings.

KEN  watches him for a moment.

Then he moves to the phonograph. He turns it on, lowers the needle. The classical music plays.

He studies ROTHKO.

SCENE TWO

ROTHKO stands starting at the central painting; the audience.   Classical music plays from the phonograph. (ROTHKO favoured Mozart and Schubert.)   KEN enters. He carries bags of Chinese takeout food. He now wears work clothes splattered with paint and glue. Months have passed and he is more comfortable here.   KEN puts a handful of change into an empty coffee can and then unloads the cartons of food.   ROTHKO muses.  

ROTHKO: Rembrandt and Rothko… Rembrandt and Rothko… Rothko and Rembrandt… Rothko and Rembrandt… And Turner. Rothko and Rembrandt and Turner… Rothko and Rembrandt and Turner –  

KEN: – Oh my.  

Beat.   ROTHKO lights a cigarette.  

KEN: The Chinese place is closing.  

ROTHKO: Everything worthwhile ends. We are in the perpetual process now: creation, maturation, cessation.  

KEN: There’s another Chinese round the corner.

ROTHKO: The eternal cycles grind on, generations pass away, hope turns arid, but there’s another Chinese round the corner.  

KEN: Not much for small talk.  

ROTHKO: It’s small.  

He joins KEN. He stands and eats Chinese food messily with a fork through the following.  

KEN: I went to the Modern last night, saw the Picasso show.  

ROTHKO: And?  

KEN: I don’t think he’s so much concerned with generations passing away.  

ROTHKO: Don’t kid yourself, kid. That man – though now a charlatan of course signing menus for money like Dali, when he’s not making ugly little pots, also for money – that man at his best understood the workings of time… Where’s the receipt?  

KEN gives him the receipt for the Chinese food.   ROTHKO puts it into a shoebox filled with other receipts as he continues without stopping.  

ROTHKO: Tragic, really, to grow superfluous in your own lifetime. We destroyed Cubism, de Kooning and me and Pollock and Barnett Newman and all the others. We stomped it to death. Nobody can paint a Cubist picture today.  

KEN: You take pride in that. ‘Stomping’ Cubism to death.  

ROTHKO: The child must banish the father. Respect him, but kill him.  

KEN: And enjoy it?  

ROTHKO: Doesn’t matter. Just be audacious and do it… Courage in painting isn’t facing the blank canvas, it’s facing Manet, it’s facing Velasquez. All we can do is move beyond what was there, to what is here, and hope to get some intimation of what will be here. ‘What is past and passing and to come.’ That’s Yeats, whom you haven’t read.  

KEN: Come on, but Picasso –  

ROTHKO tries another carton of food, keeps eating.  

ROTHKO: Picasso I thank for teaching me that movement is everything! Movement is life. The second we’re born we squall, we writhe, we squirm; to live is to move. Without movement paintings are what?  

KEN: Dead?  

ROTHKO: Precisely… (He gestures to his paintings.) Look at the tension between the blocks of color: the dark and the light, the red and the black and the brown. They exist in a state of flux – of movement. They abut each other on the actual canvas, so too do they abut each other in your eye. They ebb and flow and shift, gently pulsating. The more you look at them the more they move… They float in space, they breathe… Movement, communication, gesture, flux, interaction; letting them work… They’re not dead because they’re not static. They move through space if you let them, this movement takes time, so they’re temporal. They require time.  

KEN: They demand it. They don’t work without it.  

ROTHKO: This is why it’s so important to me to create a place. A place the viewer can contemplate the paintings over time and let them move.  

KEN: (Excited.) They need the viewer. They’re not like representational pictures, like traditional landscapes or portraits.  

ROTHKO: Tell me why.  

KEN: Because they change, they move, they pulse. Representational pictures are unchanging; they don’t require the active participation of the viewer. Go to the Louvre in the middle of the night and the ‘Mona Lisa’ will still be smiling. But do these paintings still pulse when they’re alone?  

KEN is lost in thought.

ROTHKO watches him, pleased.  

KEN: That’s why you keep the lights so low.  

ROTHKO: Is it?  

KEN: To help the illusion. Like a magician. Like a play. To keep it mysterious, to let the pictures pulsate. Turn on bright lights and the stage effect is ruined – suddenly it’s nothing but a bare stage with a bunch of fake walls.  

KEN goes to the light switches. He snaps on all the lights. Ugly fluorescent lights sizzle on. The room immediately loses its magic.  

ROTHKO: What do you see?  

KEN: My eyes are adjusting… Just… White.  

ROTHKO: What does white make you think of?  

KEN: Bones, skeletons… Charnel house… Anemia… Cruelty.  

ROTHKO is surprised by this response.  

ROTHKO: Really?  

KEN: It’s like an operating theatre now.

ROTHKO: How does white make you feel?

KEN: Frightened?

ROTHKO: Why?  

KEN: Doesn’t matter.  

ROTHKO: Why?  

KEN: It’s like the snow…outside the room where my parents died. It was winter. I remember the snow outside the window: white… (Turns his attention to the paintings.) And the pictures in this light… They’re flat. Vulgar… This light hurts them.  

ROTHKO turns off the fluorescent lights. The normal light returns.

ROTHKO: You see how it is with them? How vulnerable they are?… People think I’m controlling: controlling the light; controlling the height of the pictures; controlling the shape of the gallery… It’s not controlling, it’s protecting. A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It’s a risky act to send it out into the world.  

KEN tosses away the cartons of food and straightens up.   ROTHKO puts on a new classical record. Moves back to studying his central painting.   A beat as the mood settles.

KEN: You ever paint outdoors?

ROTHKO: You mean out in nature?

KEN: Yeah.

ROTHKO: Nature doesn’t work for me. The light’s no good.  

KEN is amused.  

ROTHKO: All those bugs – ach! I know, those plein air painters, they sing to you endless paeans about the majesty of natural sunlight. Get out there and muck around in the grass, they tell you, like a cow. When I was young I didn’t know any better so I would haul my supplies out there and the wind would blow the paper and the easel would fall over and the ants would get in the paint. Oy… But then I go to Rome for the first time. I go to the Santa Maria del Popolo to see Caravaggio’s ‘Conversion of Saul,’ which turns out is tucked away in a dark corner of this dark church with no natural light. It’s like a cave. But the painting glowed! With a sort of rapture it glowed. Consider: Caravaggio was commissioned to paint the picture for this specific place, he had no choice. He stands there and he looks around. It’s like under the ocean it’s so goddamn dark. How’s he going to paint here? He turns to his creator: ‘God, help me, unworthy sinner that I am. Tell me, O Lord on High, what the fuck do I do now?!’  

KEN laughs.  

ROTHKO: Then it comes to him: the divine spark. He illuminates the picture from within! He gives it inner luminosity. It lives… Like one of those bioluminescent fish from the bottom of the ocean, radiating its own effulgence. You understand? Caravaggio was –  

He abruptly stops. KEN looks at him. Beat. ROTHKO stares at his painting. He tilts his head. Like he’s listening.   Like he’s seeing something new in the painting.  

ROTHKO: Bring me the second bucket.  

KEN, excited, brings him a brush and a bucket of dark, maroon paint.