From January 6 through February 4, 2012, SpeakEasy Stage will present the New England Premiere of the 2010 Tony Award-winning play RED by John Logan.
A searing portrait of an artist’s ambition and vulnerability, RED focuses on abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko in 1958 as he is about to begin work on a series of large murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York’s famed Seagram Building. To help with this work, Rothko hires a new young assistant; and as the two prep canvasses and mix paint, they have what amounts to a master class on the methods and purpose of art. A moving and compelling account of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, RED also chronicles Rothko’s growing realization that this commission, which should be the crowning achievement of his career, could also be his undoing.
For this New England Premiere production, SpeakEasy Stage Company Producing Artistic Director Paul Daigneault has tapped Norton Award-winner David R. Gammons to direct. Mr. Gammons is a director, designer, visual artist, and theatre educator whose recent directing projects include The Hotel Nepenthe, The Duchess of Malfi, and Titus Andronicus for Actors' Shakespeare Project and the Boston premiere of Blackbird for SpeakEasy.
Boston actor Thomas Derrah, winner of the 2011 Elliot Norton Award for his work in the one–man show R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe, will portray Mark Rothko in the SpeakEasy production. He will be joined by Boston University alumnus Karl Baker Olson, whose SpeakEasy credits include roles in The History Boys and Reckless.
The design team includes Cristina Todesco (scenic); Gail Astrid Buckley (costumes); Jeff Adelberg (lighting) and Bill Barclay (sound). Katie Ailinger is the Production Stage Manager.
RED will play for five weeks, from January 6 through February 4, in the Virginia Wimberly Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts,
527 Tremont Street in Boston’s South End.
Ticket prices range from $50-$55 with discounts for students, seniors and persons age 25 and under. For tickets or more information, the public is invited to call 617-933-8600 or visit www.SpeakEasyStage.com.
About Mark Rothko
Born Marcus Rotkovitch in the town of Dvinsk, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, Mark Rothko immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of ten, settling in Portland, Oregon. A gifted student, Rothko attended Yale University on scholarship from 1921-23, but disillusioned by the social milieu and financial hardship, he dropped out and moved to New York to "bum around and starve a bit." A chance invitation from a friend brought him to a drawing class at the Art Students League where he discovered his love of art. He took two classes there but was otherwise self-taught.
Rothko painted in a figurative style for nearly twenty years, his portraits and depictions of urban life baring the soul of those living through The Great Depression in New York. The painter Milton Avery offered Rothko both artistic and nutritional nourishment during these lean years. In the 1930s, Rothko exhibited with The Ten, a close-knit group of nine American painters, which included fellow Avery acolyte, Adolph Gottlieb. Success was moderate at best but the group provided important incubation for the Abstract Expressionist school to come.
The war years brought with it an influx of European surrealists, influencing most of the New York painters, among them Rothko, to take on a neo-surrealist style. Rothko experimented with mythic and symbolic painting for five years before moving to pure abstraction in the mid 1940s and ultimately to his signature style of two or three rectangles floating in fields of saturated color in 1949. Beginning in the early 1950s Rothko was heralded, along with Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, Franz Kline and others, as the standard bearers of the New American Painting--a truly American art that was not simply a derivative of European styles.
By the late 1950s, Rothko was a celebrated (if not wealthy) artist, winning him three mural commissions that would dominate the latter part of his career. Only in the last of these, The Rothko Chapel in Houston was he able to realize his dream of a truly contemplative environment in which to interact deeply with his artwork.
