RED: The Art of Mark Rothko in Crisis

“There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend… one day the black will swallow the red.”

– John Logan, Red

Written by Chesca Santiago
June 14, 2023

At first glance, The Necessary Theatre’s second Philippine staging of RED would seem too bare, too simple to be a good show.

No lavish stage design, no pompous costume, no dramatic musical score—none of the extravagant frills some might expect from grand theater productions.

Yet the stage still blazed a fiery red.

RED is setting the Philippine stage ablaze once again

Since its first Asian premiere in the Philippines in 2013, RED has had a penchant for the fundamentals. The numbers will show you: it’s a two-hander, one setting, zero intermission play. But that’s as far as simplicity goes.

This year, RED is back on the Philippine stage for a limited 10-show run until 18 June 2023 at the PETA Theatre Center. The re-staging sees Bart Guingona reprising his role as the egoistic abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, with JC Santos playing the naive (but not for long) fictional assistant, Ken. Partly based on real events with passages uttered by Rothko himself, RED is a multi-layered insight into the philosophical, mental, social, and economic nuances of art-making from a modernist master at the peak of his career.

A modest production for colossal preoccupations

The singular setting of the play is Rothko’s late 1950s New York studio, which, perhaps owing to spatial constraints, was not faithfully reconstructed after its original, cavernous former gymnasium configuration. Instead, the producers retained the monastic essence of Rothko’s space. They transformed the stage into a temple-like working artist’s studio, with only some stools, tables, the usual clutter of paint buckets and paintbrushes, and a huge facsimile of a Rothko canvas in the center as the altarpiece.

Bart Guingona and JC Santos after concluding the premiere of RED at the PETA Theatre Center last 9 July 2023.

It doesn’t take long for viewers to see that RED’s deceptive simplicity allows room for the grandeur of its preoccupations. Rothko and Ken bellow heated exchanges about artistic giants in more ways than one: Rothko as the overbearing employer to Ken, the looming threat of a new generation of artists to Rothko’s legacy–the great perils of consumerism to artistic integrity. It is why John Logan’s Tony-award-winning script remains as relevant as ever. After all, life is a perpetual confrontation with our personal giants—be it an employer or your artistic legacy in crisis.

RED couldn’t have found a better cast. Guingona’s Rothko, albeit largely a “solipsistic bully” in Ken’s words, knows when to betray fragility. Santos, as Ken plays deference without descending into meekness, as he upholds his own ideas despite angry didactic outbursts from Rothko. RED can be considered as a series of dialogues where the characters debate over opposite but interconnected themes – passion and reason, artistry and commercialism, old and new, life and death – in dissecting the nature of art.

Only one weekend left to catch RED in Manila! Buy tickets for the June 16, June 17, and June 18 shows at Ticket2me.