“What do you see?”
With quivering intensity, artist Mark Rothko poses this deceptively simple question to his future assistant Ken near the start of Riot King’s new production of John Logan’s Red. Quickly slipping the confines of the canvas that Ken is intently examining, the question is a gauntlet thrown down for the play’s audience. We will be asked — with urgent and mounting insistence – not just to interpret the paintings before us, but to make meaning of this production’s theatrical art, which centers the tumultuous interplay between creation and perception.
Acclaimed and prolific American playwight and screenwriter John Logan is known for a diverse portfolio that spans from the atmospheric horror of television’s Penny Dreadful to the epic grandeur of the movie Gladiator. In Red, Logan distills the essence of artistic struggle into a taut, two-character drama that excavates the psyche of Mark Rothko, a leading figure in mid-century Abstract Expressionism. Set between 1958 and 1959, the play unfolds in Rothko’s New York studio, where he labors over a series of fantastically expensive murals commissioned for the upscale Four Seasons restaurant. Rothko’s disdain for the emerging pop art movement and his internal conflict over the commodification of his work are the backdrop for an intense examination of art’s purpose, the artist’s integrity, and the inevitable tension between commercial success and personal vision.
The company masterfully immerses us. Director and Set Designer Kenzia Dalie uses the intimacy of the angular Theatre Centre space to conjure a compelling mix of authenticity and otherworldliness. We are in Rothko’s paint-spattered sanctum, which is a deliberately low-lit symphony of organized chaos, dotted with paintings (provided by real-life abstract artist Ian Harper) and the machinery of art — wood frames, shelves, buckets, paint, drop cloths. But the space is only half-formed. The theatre’s concrete walls and wide floorspace remain visible. The much-discussed and frequently contemplated Seagram murals hover out of sight, somewhere above and behind us as we face the stage. And each entrance or exit through the two stage doors (whether Ken goes to get Chinese food, or Rothko arrives from the Four Seasons) – feels like a passage through a trans-dimensional portal. For as much as this is an artist’s studio, it is also a psychic and spiritual bubble, formed by Rothko’s febrile art and held together by his fragile concentration.
As Rothko, Lindsay Merrithew fills this bubble near-bursting, with a presence that is mesmerizing and unsettling. For a moment as the play started – for just a moment – I found his performance overwrought. But we are inside his world and his mind . . . so I almost immediately entered his thrall. Merrithew brilliantly channels the artist’s grandiosity and self-absorption, as he delivers monologues and interrogations with a fervor that oscillates between profound insight and abrasive arrogance, and masks gaping vulnerability.
Where Merrithew’s Rothko is a scenery-chewing artist teetering on the precipice between brilliance and madness, Brendan Kinnon’s Ken is tentative and deferential. Initially overshadowed by Rothko’s towering ego, Ken absorbs his master’s teachings with quiet intensity. And as the play progresses, he gains substance and an almost luminescent vibrancy – like the paintings the duo so passionately discuss. The interplay between Merrithew and Kinnon is electric, embodying the mentor-mentee dynamic with a complexity that transcends the stage. Their relationship caroms between adversarial confrontation and father-son tenderness, with larger-than-life experience clashing with the raw potential of youth. This tension is the lifeblood of the production, driving the narrative forward.
Meanwhile, Rothko’s core discontent—that “everything becomes everything else, and it’s all nice and pretty and likable”—is the philosophical spine of the play. His relentless quest for discernment and meaning in art propels his insistent, almost plaintive inquiry, “What do you see?” The question is a mantra urging both Ken and the audience to move past surface impressions, in order to plumb the nature and value of art itself. Red is ultimately a dialogue-dance between polarities: reverence for our artistic forebears vs the necessity of rupture and innovation; inhuman greatness vs the hunger for human connection; abrasive and swaggering certainty about the value of one’s art, vs pitiable insecurity about whether viewers will be kind in their assessment of it.
And looming beneath are still deeper polarities: passion and rationality, life and death, red and black, the self and the other. Their interplay crafts a complex abstract tapestry. And like the many paintings and canvases, seen and unseen, which are under constant discussion between Rothko and Ken, this tapestry challenges us to apply our base layer of perceptions and biases, to paint atop it . . . and to interrogate, even anguish over its value.
“What do you see?”
Rothko’s question at the play’s close garners the same brief answer from Ken as it did at the start of the play – but their symbiotic dialogue throughout the play infuses his second answer with new richness, resonance and depth. Likewise, Riot King’s production of Red does not merely present Logan’s play – it ignites a dialogue that lingers, accretes, and vibrates in the mind long after the lights come up.
Red continues until April 6, 2025 at The Theatre Centre. Reserve tickets on theatrecentre.org.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2025
