THEATRE REVIEW: RED
25 NOV/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
R: 5/5

Pictured: David Coomber, Jim Mezon

TORONTO - If you’ve got 90 minutes to spare and want to spend them engrossed in a thrilling and passionate discussion on art and artists, here’s some advice: Get down to the Bluma Appel Theatre, buy a ticket for RED and then — and I mean this in the nicest possible way — just shut up and listen. Because when it comes to thrilling and passionate discussions about art and artists, it simply doesn’t get much better than John Logan’s Tony Award-winning play.

A co-production of Canadian Stage, Vancouver Playhouse and Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, RED opened its Canadian première at the Bluma Thursday, where it will run through Dec. 17.

Set in the paint-splattered New York studio of famed abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, the play takes place in the late 1950s, covering the two years the renowned artist famously devoted to creating murals commissioned for the Four Seasons eatery in the famed Seagram Building, the fate of which has become the stuff of artistic legend.

It is, coincidentally, the same two years an aspiring (and entirely fictional) young artist named Ken (played by David Coomber) was employed by Rothko (played here as something akin to a force of nature by Jim Mezon).

It begins as Ken reports for duty, clearly much in awe of the great man in whose service he has just enlisted. His job? Mix paint. Stretch and prep canvas. Fetch supplies from the outside world, including paint, coffee, cigarettes and, no doubt, replacements for the bottle of whiskey that will figure often in their subsequent discussions. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, for in the beginning, those discussions are more monologues as Rothko delivers a series of lectures on the art world and the place he and his work hold in it.

But as time passes and the self-absorbed Rothko opens up about the creative process, the young man slowly loses the sense of awe that has heretofore informed their working relationship, daring to express opinions of his own. In fact, the title of the play comes from a single word Ken offers up in answer to a question Rothko clearly intended to be purely rhetorical, inspiring a breathtaking reaction that borders on the tectonic. But as Ken’s confidence grows, Rothko’s seems to diminish, and through the process, art is once again reborn in a process that was old when Michelangelo was a pup.

In its original configuration, RED played in one of the West End’s smallest performance spaces, and to re-create that sense of intimacy, designer David Boechler and director Kim Collier have shrunk their stage, setting Rothko’s studio on the diagonal, opening up the set on two sides and allowing many of the more thoughtful monologues on Rothko’s work and his philosophy to be delivered directly to the audience.

And when those two walls reappear to accommodate scene changes, they are transformed into faux-Rothkos by the projections of Brian Johnson, affording intimations, in addition to the recreated canvases that litter the stage, of the power of Rothko’s monolithic works.

For a director whose work has most often been rooted in movement, Collier acquits herself beautifully, keeping a tight rein on Mezon’s raw power as Rothko, while slowly coaxing Coomber’s Ken into full bloom until the two match each other note for note in the soaring arias Logan has written — each a love letter to the enduring magic that is making art.

In a lesser production, the more lurid aspects of Alan Brodie’s over-enthusiastic lighting design could be distracting. But with a play and performances as strong as these, such excesses all but disappear.
If you love art, you’ll most definitely be seeing RED.