In 1958, the painter Mark Rothko was offered a commission. The architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson had designed a new Park Avenue building for the drinks company Joseph E. Seagram and Sons. There was to be a fancy New York restaurant therein, The Four Seasons. The iconoclastic Rothko, a misanthropic painter obsessed with trying to translate the tragic notions of Nietzsche and Aeschylus onto a flat canvas, was asked to design a series of murals. For an abstract-expressionist painter who was all about deeply disturbing the viewer, that presented a conundrum.
Was this well-paying commission a pathetic sellout that would undermine his creative soul? Or a rare chance to make superficial suits choke on their food without really knowing why?
By sticking his play Red (2009) entirely inside Rothko’s studio in 1958 and 1959 and restricting himself to conversations between Rothko and his young assistant, Ken, playwright John Logan has found a structure wherein two
generations of artist can fight over the meaning and purpose of art. As time progresses, the initially sycophantic Ken learns the hypocrisies inherent in the opinions and actions of his employer, an artist who hates bankers but who keeps bankers’ hours himself.