“What do you see?” asks Mark Rothko (Phil Luna), standing before a giant red canvas at the start of the play. “Let it work on you… let it embrace you,” he instructs his assistant Ken (J.W. Spina).
What the famous painter wants his assistant to see in the red painting is a living, breathing, pulsating thing, a lifetime of stories, endless layers and “tragedy in every brush stroke.” In his brusque manner, the moody master berates and belittles the young man and loads him with heavy reading, Nietzsche to Freud, Schopenhauer to Yates. But teacher will ultimately learn something from student about art and artistry.
What the playwright wants the audience to see in “Red” is that pulsating life and then some. If we let it work on us, the play opens us to new ways of thinking about the power of art and artists.
