Red: Rothko on Stage

Alfred Molina played Mark Rothko on stage in John Logan’s Red, a Donmar Warehouse production. His impassioned performance was impressive, Michael Grandage’s direction was effectively composed, and the set replicated the artist’s studio credibly. Yet the play, for me, lacked credibility, despite the raving reviews it received both in London and here in New York. My immediate reaction was why Rothko rather than an unnamed artist, if the play’s point was the internal struggle of a tortured artist. But the point, for Logan, was evidently Rothko.

The problem was with the play itself. It was conceived as a docudrama on stage, an impossible enterprise. A documentary makes use of documents; so, a documentary film compiles the footage of real people and place, stock or newly shot. But in the process of editing, the filmmaker would bring to the work her/his point of view, and, in this manner, fictionalizes it by default. Enacted on stage, a play cannot realize its set and characters except by reconstruction. Logan’s Red is therefore a fiction aspiring to be a documentary but, given that such is an impossibility, can only be a fiction pretending to be a documentary. The final effect, therefore, lacks conviction. It is a fake, patently false, a fiction which should have presented itself as faction.

Representation of artists on film and stage is rarely convincing. But an instructive comparison is Edward Albee’s The Occupant, as the title read, which portrayed Louise Nevelson. In this play the artist, played by Mercedes Ruehl, is interviewed by an anonymous interviewer after her death. In each play, an actor mimics a celebrated artist. The lines the actor is given to speak, in each case, are drawn from the artist’s biographical material. In this sense, the text is documentary. But whereas Molina impersonates Rothko’s actions -- his activities in the studio, Ruehl taking on the persona of Nevelson talks about the artist’s life and art as she might have spoken in interviews during her lifetime. Ruehl’s Nevelson is fully credible. This is because Albee’s play is not a fiction pretending to be a documentary. Rather, it is a documentary constructed into a dramatic fiction.

Fictionalized biography of any kind is tricky. It is generally successful in writing; examples of biographical and historical novels are abundant. Margaret Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian is one preeminent case that comes to my mind. Writing allows the reader to create the character in her/his mind. A visual medium -- film or stage -- renders the characterization of the subject concrete; the viewer is given an image which is by default fraudulent. It is perhaps no surprise that in Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon, also from Donmar Warehouse and directed by Michael Grandage, Frank Langella’s president was credible; the substance of this play was a series of Frost’s interviews of Nixon.

My dissatisfaction with Red was real. But it took me days of mulling over the play and its presumed failure. The explanation may be totally off the track, of course; it is, after all, only an opinion of one seasoned theater goer.