There is a line uttered by Mark Rothko (played by Bart Guingona) near the end of John Logan’s Red that gets me every single time–and I’ve seen it three times.
The Tony award-winning play is the fictive account of a true artistic dilemma in the life of master abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, a giant of modern art whose works of visceral beauty–alongside those by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman–were a revolution that upturned the ascendancy of Pablo Picasso and his ilk.
The playwright John Logan–who has written the screenplays for such popular movie fares as Gladiator, The Aviator, Star Trek: Nemesis, The Time Machine, The Last Samurai, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street–latches on one unexplained, but tantalizing, mystery in art history.
In 1958, Rothko, a famously mercurial and anguished artist, landed the biggest commission in the history of modern art. The beverage company Joseph Seagram and Sons had just finished construction of their new Mies Van der Rohe/Philip Johnson-designed building on Park Avenue in New York, whose onsite restaurant was the elegant The Four Seasons, which was to cater to the city’s elite. Rothko was paid the staggering commission of $35,000 for the series of murals which would grace the walls of the restaurant–and privately said that he was accepting it to create “something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room….”
The play unfolds with scenes from the artist’s Bowery studio depicting what could have happened during the two fascinating years that followed, until Rothko’s final reneging on his contract: he returned the commission and kept the paintings. The play shows Rothko working feverishly with his young assistant, Ken (played by Joaquin Valdez). In the course of their work, Ken–a young painter himself–gains enough confidence to challenge him, to wrestle with the bigger issues of life, art, and integrity. Their tussles soon force Rothko to acknowledge that what others had deemed for him to be his “crowning achievement” as an artist of the first rank could also be the loose thread that will unravel everything he has ever stood for as an artist: his paintings are living testaments to his voice, to his artistry. They are the canvas on which he expressed a life’s battle with nothingness; they are pulsating with red, like blood, always in a skirmish with the swallowing black. And yet you use them as weapons to cage people you have no care for in a restaurant that is certainly a temple for art? Ken reminds him. For 90 minutes, such gripping back-and-forth becomes the constitution of this elegant play, which finally becomes, as Red official program notes, “a searing portrait of an artist’s ambition and vulnerability as he tries to create a definitive work for an extraordinary setting.”
But to go back to that line that moves me with such constancy. A decisive dramatic moment has passed near the end of the play, and another verbal tussle is underway when Rothko suddenly spins on his assistant Ken, points vehemently to the outside, and shouts at him: “Because your life is out there!”
Because your life is out there.
The first time I heard that line when the play premiered at the School of Design of the De la Salle College of St. Benilde, an electric epiphany zinged through me–and I found myself breathless. After a beat, Rothko goes on to explain, in a sobering note, what he means precisely. “Listen, kid,” he says, “you don’t need to spend any more time with me. You need to find your contemporaries and make your own world, your own life… You need to get out there now, into the thick of it, shake your fist at them, talk their ear off…” And finally this: “Make something new.”
It is a shocking moment for me, and perhaps for many people as well, because it is a mirror. Every time I see that scene, I tear up because I think it speaks to me and life right now, and I think to every one’s life even, especially if you’re one to pause to consider your place in the world and what it means to pursue your art or your dream.
Why am I here?
Why am I doing this?
What exactly do I see?
These are all our unanswered questions which this play so brazenly strips down to confront us all.
