Bob Ari: (Mark Rothko) has acted on Broadway in Frost/Nixon (understudy Richard Nixon), The Constant Wife, Bells Are Ringing, and Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Off-Broadway appearances include The Late Christopher Bean, Die Mommie Die!, Jolson & Company, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Baby Anger, and June Moon. Ari toured the United States in Frost/Nixon and toured Europe in West Side Story and Guys & Dolls. He has appeared in regional theatres across the U.S. including Pioneer Theatre Company in Dracula and 12 Angry Men; Fulton Theatre, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Olney Theatre Center, Witness for the Prosecution; Delaware Theatre Company, Born Yesterday and The Price; Walnut Street Theatre, Hotel Suite and Art; The Wilma Theater, Big Love and Enemies, A Love Story; New Jersey and Utah Shakespeare Festivals; The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis (3 seasons); and many others. Film and television credits include Two Lovers, Wanted, Kissing Jessica Stein, Music of the Heart, Cradle Will Rock, Christmas Evil, Onion News Network, Delocated, The Good Wife, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Cheers, Cagney and Lacey, Soap, L.A. Law, All My Children and more. less has acted on Broadway in Frost/Nixon (understudy Richard Nixon), The Constant Wife, Bells Are Ringing, and Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Off-Broadway appearances include The Late Christopher Bean, Die Mommie Die!, Jolson & Company, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Baby Anger, and June Moon. Ari toured the United States in... more

Randy Harrison: (Ken) made his Broadway debut as Boq in Wicked. His other New York credits include The Singing Forest, Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival; Antony and Cleopatra, Theater for a New Audience; Edward the Second, Red Bull Theater; A Letter from Ethel Kennedy, Manhattan Class Company; Notes! and Swan!!! with the Qwan Company at PS122; Abrons Arts Center and Theatre 80; and numerous appearances in Our Hit Parade at Joe's Pub. Regionally he appeared most recently in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. as well as Twelfth Night, Shakespeare Theatre, D.C.; Pop!, Yale Repertory Theatre; The Glass Menagerie, Guthrie Theater; A Midsummer Night's Dream, SITI Company at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival; and numerous seasons at Berkshire Theatre Festival. His film and television work includes five seasons on Showtime's Queer as Folk and Bang Bang You're Dead. less made his Broadway debut as Boq in Wicked. His other New York credits include The Singing Forest, Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival; Antony and Cleopatra, Theater for a New Audience; Edward the Second, Red Bull Theater; A Letter from Ethel Kennedy, Manhattan Class Company; Notes! and Swan!!! with the Qwan... more

Play Guide - Red: Click on the related files link below to view the Play Guide! The CPH Play Guide lets you go deeper into our work, exploring the people, themes and ideas behind every CPH play. Making the Guide a part of your play-going is a great way to enrich your CPH experience!   Legendary American artist Mark Rothko—the subject of Red—once said, “I think of my pictures as dramas.” What a perfect subject , then, for a play! (In this case a Tony Award winning play by an Oscar-nominated writer.) In this Play Guide, get to know the complicated artist at the center of Red; learn about Rothko’s path to Abstract Expressionism—and what he was trying to express; discover what Sweeney Todd has to do with Red; and explore the play’s CPH connection (hint: Phillip Johnson), and why Rothko accepted a huge commission to create art for people he hates.   Once you’ve enjoyed the Play Guide, come be a part of our free, fun and informal pre-show conversations! They start 45 minutes before EVERY performance.   Enjoy, and we’ll see you in the Allen. Click on the related files link below to view the Play Guide! less Click on the related files link below to view the Play Guide! The CPH Play Guide lets you go deeper into our work, exploring the people, themes and ideas behind every CPH play. Making... more

The Seagram Murals: A Symbol of Wealth or an Act of Revenge: The Seagram Murals:  A Symbol of Wealth or an Act of Revenge Jonathan Jones, The Guardian,  December 6, 2002   "I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room!"- Rothko, in Red                  Mark Rothko was an unknown abstract expressionist when he won a plum commission - to provide paintings for New York's swankiest restaurant, The Four Seasons. So why did he pull out? Of all the New York painters who became famous at the end of the 1940s, Rothko was the most addicted to the city. When he had the money, he lived on Sixth Avenue, near Radio City Music Hall. He had studios all over the city, changing them often - the Four Seasons murals were painted in a former gymnasium on the Bowery which he rigged up with a false wall and pulley system so he could experiment with their architectural layout. Rothko was intense, solitary, leftwing, used to poverty and failure.  His New York was a city of deli lunch counters, subway stations, art classrooms, visits to the Metropolitan Museum. And now, after a lifetime spent mainly as an unknown, unsuccessful would-be great artist, Mark Rothko was offered $35,000 to decorate a symbol of the wealth of Manhattan's elite at the height of the cold war. Why did he accept the commission? Accounts of what was said to Rothko and what he thought he was doing differ. The critic Dore Ashton, a regular visitor to Rothko's studio, had the impression that Rothko believed his panels would hang in a boardroom which would be visible from an employees' canteen, that they would be accessible to ordinary office workers. If Rothko believed this, it was a fantasy. Phyllis Lambert and Philip Johnson deny that he could have been under any such illusion - they say he was perfectly aware he was making paintings for an expensive restaurant. Rothko did know what he was doing, and what kind of people he was doing it for. He saw his Four Seasons murals as violent, even terrorist art, a savage aesthetic revenge, and relished the chance to bite the hands of those who had made him rich. This is what Rothko told John Fischer, a fellow tourist he bumped into in the bar of an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic in the early summer of 1959 after he had been working for several months on the paintings. Fischer was an editor of Harper's Magazine and their conversations over drinks have therefore been recorded - Fischer published Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Man, a memoir of Rothko, in Harper's Magazine in July 1970. Fischer quotes Rothko describing the room in that very expensive restaurant in the Seagram Building as "a place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off". Rothko didn't seem to Fischer in the least unworldly, let alone spiritual about his intentions. "I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room," he gloated, with paintings that will make those rich bastards "feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up". less The Seagram Murals:  A Symbol of Wealth or an Act of Revenge Jonathan Jones, The Guardian,  December 6, 2002   "I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room!"- Rothko, in Red                  Mark Rothko... more

A Conversation with Playwright John Logan: Q: What was the impetus for Red?John Logan: My initial attraction was to the Seagram murals themselves. I was in London filming Sweeney Todd [for which Logan wrote the screenplay], so I was there for months on end, and one day I walked into the Tate Modern and went to the room with the Seagram murals. I knew very little about Mark Rothko, very little about Abstract Expressionism, but I found the paintings themselves profoundly moving and kinetic in a strange way. I went to the wall and read a little description about how he painted them originally for the Seagram Building and then decided to keep them and give the money back. And I thought, “Well, this is an interesting story.”Q: Do you have a background in visual art?JL: No. None whatsoever. The great, daunting challenge of Red is that Mark Rothko is such an intellectually challenging artist and he knew where he belonged in the continuum of his art. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of painting and of artists, so I realized I would have to gain a significant understanding of art history. I spent eight or nine months researching art history. In a way it was like learning a new language for me – the language of visual art. It was necessary because that language was Mark Rothko’s frame of reference. So before the character could speak about anything, I felt as though I had to have some facility in the visual arts and in the specifics of the language of art history.Q: In what ways is Rothko important as an artist?JL: He’s important because of his absolute, uncompromising purity. He deeply believed that art mattered. He felt that it should be like a religious experience, and his great dream was to create a space that was like a church. He wanted people to take art that seriously because he believed it was redemptive. He believed that it was important to the human spirit to create art, to experience art, to be open to art because he truly believed it allowed an exultation of the heart and the spirit. I think he did something that no one else has quite done – particularly in Abstract Expressionism – and that is to create something that is profoundly simple and profoundly moving. There’s no clutter, there’s nothing unnecessary; his paintings are austere and savage. And I think his contemporaries were influenced by other movements in art: Op Art, Pop Art, Impressionism. Rothko was too, of course, but he stayed the course on his vision, on single-mindedlydoing what he believed he could do.Q: Rothko was not religious as an adult, but do you see vestiges of his Jewish upbringing in his work?JL: Yes, I think there’s a rabbinical streak to his work. And he brought a Talmudic seriousness and level of analysis to everything he did, while still letting it be pure and simple.Q: You also faced the challenge of portraying an infamous historical person on stage. How did you approach that?JL: Considering he’s such a major artist there’s not a whole lot of biographical information out there. There’s one major biography, by James E.B. Breslin. Rothko’s own writings about art are also useful. He was a very important essayist on art and a very challenging thinker. Because his thoughts are so complex, it took me an incredible amount of time to work through the logic to understand them.Q: And what about Rothko’s young assistant in the play, Ken? Was he inspired by an actual person?JL: No, he’s not based on an actual assistant. I just wanted him to be an emotionally agile person who begins the play in a really vulnerable position: wanting a hero. The point about writing a two-person play is that it’s a binary relationship. You have to let the characters respond to one another and segue back and forth. I knew that Rothko would have to be the prow of an ocean liner cutting through the ocean and Ken would have to be the wave that billows around it for most of the play.Q: One of the major ideas in the play is that the son has to kill the father, metaphorically speaking. Does that come directly from Rothko?JL: No, that was entirely me. To me the play is really not about art at all. … I wanted to write a play about teachers and students, mentors and protégés, fathers and sons. To me the piece has always been very domestic. Rothko had an awareness of young artists and an awareness of responsibility to young artists, but he wasn’t a teacher in any traditional sense. In fact, the relationship he has with Ken, his assistant, is not like the relationships he had with his actual assistants, which were very utilitarian.Q: Why did you choose to tell this story on stage rather than on screen?JL: I thought painting on stage would be really arresting and exciting. When two men prime a canvas on stage, you’re seeing a real thing happen; the paint is really splattering over the actors. And from the very beginning, I knew it was going to be a play about language. The characters talk, I hope, in an exciting, muscular, visceral way, but they’re talking. And one thing cinema doesn’t do, at least not for great stretches of time, is dialogue. It doesn’t deal with the nuances of language.Q: You’re busy as a screenwriter. Do you plan to write more plays?JL: Yes. I started out writing plays, and theatre has always been incredibly important to me. I always say, “Movies are my wife but theatre is my mistress.” With Red, I rediscovered what it’s like to be a playwright and that was very fulfilling. As soon as Red was up and running, I started working on a new play because it’s satisfying work. And I’m working on the book for a couple of musicals, so my plan is to keep stepping between both worlds. I’ve only ever wanted to be one thing: a dramatist. Whether I’m writing lines that are going to be spoken on film or on stage or book scenes for musicals that will then segue into songs, it’s still being a dramatist. People frequently ask me, “Is writing plays different from writing movies?” My answer is no, not at all. Every day I wake up to write lines for actors and I hope I will continue to be able to do that for many years, in many venues. less Q: What was the impetus for Red?John Logan: My initial attraction was to the Seagram murals themselves. I was in London filming Sweeney Todd [for which Logan wrote the screenplay], so I was there for months on end, and one day I walked into the Tate Modern and... more