It's a veritable gullywasher, a torrent of words from Bryan Dykstra and Matthew Carlson. They're John Logan's words, and they pour from the stage in brilliant, mesmerizing style in "Red," which opened the 2011-12 season of the Repertory Theatre last night at the Loretto-Hilton Center.
"Red," which won a Tony Award in 2010, is a drama about Mark Rothko, an Abstract Expressionist painter, in the throes of creation in the late 1950s. He has accepted a $35,000 commission to paint murals for the Four Seasons, a restaurant in New York's newest and most glamorous office building, though it's difficult to understand why the owners wanted abstract murals in red and black. Still, it happened.
Rothko, played with immense skill and hard-to-believe power by Brian Dykstra, has a new assistant, Ken, an incisive thinker and would-be painter who hopes to learn in a relationship much like an apprenticeship to an artist he admires. Being an assistant to Rothko involves many duties, like mixing paints, making coffee, stretching canvas and helping apply a base coat, going out for Chinese food and offering other vital assistance to a genius.
Matthew Carlson, in a beautifully underplayed performance, makes Ken a perfect devil's advocate and sorcerer's apprentice to Rothko.
Rothko sees his role as more than just a painter. He studies the sites where the paintings would hang before he began. "Most of painting is thinking," he says, and the real Rothko was known as an artist who would sit and stare four hours — or days — at a work in progress.
Dykstra rides the roller-coaster that is Rothko, holding tight and taking the turns at breakneck speed. He's jealous, too, putting down rival Jackson Pollock by saying, "Pollock is emotional, Rothko is intellectual."
Anger and insult pour from the painter like lava from a volcano, and he lets loose a tirade against the use of the word "fine" that is howlingly funny and deadly accurate at the same time. He rips into manners and morals, too, noting with skin-peeling sarcasm, "our constitutional right to be happy." Dykstra's performance is a gem. His force dominates, but Carlson comes very close to equaling him in his own, quieter way, especially when he questions Rothko about selling his paintings to hang on the walls of a restaurant.
Watching Dykstra and Carlson work is a delight. See them casually exchange Chinese food containers and keep right on eating. Or watch them in an almost choreographed sequence as they apply a base coat to a canvas. It's charming, funny, intriguing and a tribute to Steven Wolff's strong direction, which shows a mature yet sensitive touch in making "Red" a powerful, funny, impeccable evening of theater, with Logan's words used to their best effect.
Michael Ganio's set depicts Rothko's studio, awash in clutter. Dorothy Marshall Englis's costumes were appropriate and Phil Monat's lighting design was delicious.
Red, a production of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, opened last night at the Loretto-Hilton Center and will run through Oct. 2
— Joe