Published in Interaksyon Lifestyle March 2, 2013
To fully appreciate John Logan’s Red, currently produced and performed by Actors’ Actors Inc. for its Asian run, you would have to see it at least twice. Not that I have—but that one viewing was enough to convince me that it was not enough to grasp the intricacies of the issues that Logan was grappling with through the characters that he had brought back to life within the four walls of the stage.
There are no pyrotechnics in this 90-minute play that runs without an intermission. Just a drab, dinky-looking office for its one and only setting. A few pieces of furniture, paint, and an unremarkable canvas that are evidence that artists are at work. And two actors (Bart Guingona and Joaquin Valdes) who unleash upon each other line after life of brilliant dialogue that makes the audience re-examine their perspectives on art, and the passion (if any) that they bring to life.
There was good reason why Red won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2010. It reminds you that the play is the thing—the written word incarnated in complex characters who are made flesh-and-blood by actors who can give them the depth and layering that they require.
Red revolves around an enigmatic choice made by the real-life abstract expressionist Mark Rothko (Guingona) in 1958. Rothko, the last of his kind who had outlived his equally fiery contemporaries like Jackson Pollock, retrieved the series of murals he had been commissioned to paint for the posh Seagram Building in New York. This decision cost him a fortune: the return of the payment he had already been given .
It would have been easy enough to define the essence of the play as an artist battling for his integrity amidst the rising sprawl of commercialism in a more consumerist era. However, it is against those platitudes or simplified formulas that Red through its main character warns us against. Everyman is represented in this play by Valdes’ young, idealistic apprentice, a fictional character created by Logan to act as yin against Rothko’s yang.
As the younger artist would be made to realize time and again by Rothko, nothing is as simple as it looks: A color is not merely a hue on a white piece, but an imagery of emotion that can bring back ecstatic and traumatic memories alike. An artist does not merely create from the brow of his own genius, but has to find his place—and his differentiation—in the culture that birthed him. In the simple act of reading, a would-be creator must acknowledge that he stands on the shoulders of giants.
Even the younger artist’s heartfelt homage to the masters such as Van Gogh who had paid a huge price for their artistry is dismissed by Rothko with a reprimand that leaves one stunned. Rothko angrily tells the newbie not to put them on a pedestal but (and to paraphrase) simply honor their struggle with a sacred silence.
This is not a one-sided battle, as the apprentice shows himself more than an equal to his employer-cum-guru. For as Logan has Rothko measure the world around him, he transforms his Everyman into a reluctant mirror into Rothko’s soul. We see the genius’ bitter disillusionment at the world around him, the decline of his artistic kind as the former leaders of art who had trounced Cubism and must now be obliterated by modernism, the constant struggle of the Apollonian and Dionysian elements—order and passion, light and darkness, reason and madness—within his soul.
And when Valdes’ younger apprentice forces Guingona’s Rothko into revealing the reason behind his decision, it is unexpected—and yet, in following the thematic of the play, expectedly complicated.
Guingona, who also directs the play, brings his usual intensity and brutal directness to the main character. The man has made a career of playing this kind of unconventional, independent-to-the-point-of-obnoxious archetype. And he lets it all out on Valdes’ less tormented character. There are times that it seems that Valdes and his theatrical alter ego would be swallowed by the volatility of Guingona’s Rothko. Fortunately, the play gives the former enough ammunition and his own complexity to hold his own.
Nothing is as it seems in Logan’s Red. And after seeing the world albeit briefly through the eyes of its main character, nothing will be as simple as it appears afterward again.
(Red runs up to March 2 at the CSB-SDA Theater, 5/F College of St. Benilde School of Design and Arts located at Pablo Ocampo St. (formerly Vito Cruz), Malate, Manila. Tickets are available at Ticketworld 891-9999 or through 0915-9108098.)
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