Red

What do you see? Mark Rothko asks his new apprentice Ken of one of his paintings at the beginning of Red by John Logan. “Let it wrap its arms around you; let it embrace you, filling even your peripheral vision so nothing else exists or has ever existed or ever will exist.”The same can be said of Red itself. An intense, expansive play, it follows the artist Mark Rothko and his apprentice as they work to complete Rothko’s famous Seagram Mural paintings. Through a series of scenes in Rothko’s studio, Red explores the shifting power dynamics between an aging artist who was once seen as revolutionary and his young student, as well as the question of what it means to create lasting, meaningful works of art.