Last Tuesday, Mer and I headed up to Cleveland again for another education evening at Playhouse Square. The folks at Playhouse Square offer education sessions for selected plays. They bring in teachers, and feed them a simple but good meal (sandwiches, fruit, and many cookies), and give them background on the play they will see that evening, which is also for free. Playhouse Square treats teachers well.

Mer gets to go because she is an English teacher, and I get to go along because I coach an improv group, and so there is a theater tie-in there. This particular evening we were going to see the play Red, which is a play about the mid-twentieth-century artist Mark Rothko. While Rothko’s style evolved over the years, he is best known for colorful stripes on a solid-colored background.

The lecture we heard covered how Rothko’s style evolved from his early work, which was impressionistic but still resembled recognizable objects (like people), through early experiments in abstract art, to his full-blown style of color use with simple shapes. Rothko was trying to experiment with painting to see if he could elicit an emotional response from people by painting objects that had no real-world representation. Part of how he achieved this was in scale – most of his later works were huge, and he preferred them to be viewed very close up (eighteen inches or so). Rothko wanted the painting to take up the entire visual field of the viewer. The art lecturer also showed us some of the things that Rothko’s contemporaries were doing, so we could put his work in context. It was well done.

After the lecture, we went over to the theater for the public pre-show talk. The talk filled in some more background on Rothko, and was bold enough to ask the question, “What makes this art good?” as opposed to the response, “My five-year-old could have done that.” It basically boiled down to intentionality. Even abstract artists put thought and technique into their works, and so the work represents something the artist wishes to say. The young man giving the talk allowed that this was true whether the artist was famous or not. It made me feel better about the work that Rothko did.

The actual play, Red, was excellent. It covered a small portion of Rothko’s career, when he had been commissioned to paint a series of paintings for an upscale restaurant. At the time, it was the largest commission ever given to an artist ($35,000, or about $350,000 in today’s money). The set was fixed – it was a single large room where Rothko worked on his paintings, and there was a lot of open space for the two actors to work in.

The two actors played two characters – Rothko and a fictional assistant, Ken. Ken was a young artist who was hired by Rothko to help prepare canvases, mix paint, clean up, and so on. Ken’s function in the play was to act as a foil to Rothko, as someone for Rothko to interact with so that we could see and hear what Rothko was thinking and working on.

The young actor playing Ken did a fine job, although I felt his line delivery was too forced from time to time (he was occasionally too loud for the particular situation). The actor playing Rothko was jaw-droppingly masterful. He was not an actor on stage to me; he was Rotko. He was a huge stage presence.

The play ran about ninety minutes without intermission, and it never dragged. The actors actually did prepare a canvas by painting the entire canvas red, on stage, in about two minutes. It was very high-energy. The interaction between the towering presence of Rothko with his paid help was always gripping, even if Rothko sometimes abused his help terribly. Again, the set-up of the play was fictional, but it was historical fiction in that the play was extensively researched for nine months by the playwright.

All of this for free. Bravo, Playhouse Square!