Goodman's 'Red' offers complex, comical, portrait

John Logan's one-act, two-person play “Red” seems conflicted about its main character, the Abstract Expressionist artist Mark Rothko, which is appropriate in that Rothko was apparently conflicted in himself, even as he displayed a near certainty about his life's work.

“Red” captures that certainty and its companion bluster in a way that attempts to both elevate Rothko and view him as somewhat comical. Logan's play is full of Rothko's grand pronouncements, such as, “There's tragedy in every brush stroke.” And he can come off quite ponderous pontificating on the importance of Friedrich Nietzsche's early masterpiece on aesthetic theory, “The Birth of Tragedy.”

Nietzsche's reputation has suffered in more recent decades, and there are times in “Red” when he seems about to drag Rothko down with him.

Yet Logan is hyperaware of that, and in his imagined debate between Rothko and his young assistant, Ken, set at a time in the late '50s when the notoriously thorny artist was just preparing to embrace the mainstream with a series of murals designed for the opening of the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City, he sets up a clash between the highest of the high moderns and the approaching lowbrow postmoderns, described in no uncertain terms as “barbarians at the gate.” He also finds ways to undercut Rothko's pretensions with shades of humor, not unlike the play of colors in Rothko's own “multiform” works of art.

“Artists should starve,” Rothko says. “Except me.” And: “Nature doesn't work for me. The light's no good.”

A play, even a 100-minute one-act, threatens to deaden the audience with an extended argument on aesthetic theory, but “Red” dabbles in just enough humor mixed with just enough temper to keep things lively and the audience attuned. It helps that, in the hands of director Robert Falls, the Goodman Theatre captures that mix of humor and pretension in its new production to open the fall season.

Edward Gero, who played Gloucester in Falls' controversial version of “King Lear,” projects all of Rothko's self-importance, yet is well aware of where the ironic jokes are in the script. The key here, however, is Ken, played by Patrick Andrews, who was indelible as a burned-out grifter in Steppenwolf Theatre's recent revival of “American Buffalo.” Andrews has a thick way of delivering lines — like a brush stroke overladen with paint — that conveys a winning earnestness, and that helps to create a character Rothko can strike sparks against. (If someone has already bought the movie rights to Chad Harbach's new baseball novel, “The Art of Fielding,” allow me to nominate Andrews for the role of Henry Skrimshander.)

Yet Falls isn't about to reduce Rothko to a cartoon cliché. Falls is no small admirer of his art and, working within the confines of Rothko's studio, he finds ways to sell it to the audience in a convincing fashion. “What do you see?” Rothko asks Ken, directing him to a work in progress hanging in the studio early on. “Let it pulsate.”

Rothko's paintings, at their best, do pulsate, and Falls shows that by playing with lights and darks and transforming the art before the audience's eyes. When Rothko and Ken go to work priming a canvas — splashing it all over with a red that seems to shift and roil — it's a celebration of the artistic process.

That celebration wins out over the anguish in this production, but the anguish is acknowledged if largely hidden. Rothko riffs on Jackson Pollock as “a lazy suicide,” whose self-destructive ways led to his death in a car crash sure as if he'd driven off a cliff. Yet Rothko, who would be a much more deliberate suicide in 1970, after his paintings increasingly went from glowing reds to gloomy blacks, nonetheless esteems his former colleague and competitor.

“He thought it mattered,” Rothko says. “He thought painting mattered.”

How silly, in this day and age, to think art matters, painting matters, yet also how noble to be determined to prove it so. The Goodman's “Red” captures that ambivalence in way that is loyal to Logan's play, and also to the art and the artist who inspired it.

“Red”

★ ★ ★

<b>Location:</b> Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St., Chicago, (312) 443-3800, <a href="http://www.goodmantheatre.org" target="_blank"> goodmantheatre.org</a>

<b>Showtimes: </b>7:30 p.m. Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Thursday, Saturday and Sunday; 7:30 p.m. on Tuesdays, Oct. 11 and 18; through Oct. 30

<b>Running time: </b>One hour, 40 minutes; no intermission

<b>Tickets: </b>$20-$78

<b>Parking:</b> Pay garages and limited street parking.

<b>Rating: </b>Sophisticated themes, but no sex, violence or harsh language. Not for young children.