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Rothko’s paintings colored dramatist’s ‘Red’

Arts

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 08, 2012|By Christopher Wallenberg

Playwright John Logan says he seeks characters who confuse me and vex me… (Jennifer S. Altman for the…)

NEW YORK - In 2007, John Logan was in London working on the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd’’ when he stumbled into the Tate Modern and had a heart-stopping encounter with a roomful of luminous, haunting murals by Mark Rothko. The images left him breathless, deepened his appreciation for abstract art, and inspired him creatively.

A playwright and screenwriter, Logan became obsessed with the red, maroon, and black paintings that Rothko had been commissioned in 1958 to create for the Four Seasons restaurant at the landmark Seagram Building in New York.

“They were just overpowering. In a word, it was the seriousness of them that grabbed me,’’ Logan said during a recent interview at a restaurant near his loft in SoHo. “They’re inescapably tragic in some way. You cannot look at those murals and think they are frivolous or that they were created by an artist who didn’t feel pain and anguish deeply.’’

The Seagram murals became the basis for Logan’s play “Red,’’ a fictional, two-character drama about the famed abstract expressionist and his imagined assistant, Ken. Set in Rothko’s cavernous studio on the Bowery in the late 1950s, the play receives its New England premiere at SpeakEasy Stage Company, where it runs through Feb. 4. Thomas Derrah stars as Rothko, opposite Karl Baker Olson as Ken.

“Red,’’ which premiered to rave reviews in London in 2009, stormed onto Broadway in 2010, starring Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne. It captured a wheelbarrow full of prizes, including the Tony Award for best play. This season, it clocks in with “God of Carnage’’ as the most produced new play at American regional theaters, according to Theatre Communications Group.

While Logan was captivated by the Rothko murals at the Tate, it wasn’t until he walked across the room and read the wall text that the idea for a drama started to percolate in his mind. The description noted that Rothko, after several years toiling on the murals, chose to reject the prestigious and hefty commission and return the money.

“He spent two years doing 30 or 40 of these things. But at the end, he decided to keep them. So I thought, wow, there’s a titanic struggle,’’ said Logan, who is 50. “I knew very little about Rothko or abstract expressionism or even art. So I started by just learning more about him. And within two weeks of dipping my toe in like an amateur, I knew it was a play.’’