RED

Kelly and I recently saw the broadway play RED. We really enjoyed the dialog and discussion (Though we are a bit bias, because we like Rothko!). A highlight was some frantic live painting which left both actors covered in, you guessed it -red.

Written by John Logan, (Sweeney Todd, The Aviator, Gladiator and The Last Samurai) Red is a portrait of Mark Rothko, the 20th century artist known for his large canvases of color. The play recently opened at the Donmar Warehouse. It's simply two actors, one set – all the action revolves around increasingly adversarial conversations between Rothko (Alfred Molina) and his assistant (Eddie Redmayne) during a two-year period at the end of the 1950s, when Rothko was working on a highly paid commission to provide a series of murals for the new Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan's Seagram Building.

The last decade of Rothko's life his palette reduce dramatically – the refulgent primaries, the glowing oranges and yellows, of his first colour-field paintings giving way to a predominance of increasingly sombre shades of red and black: bruised plum, tarnished magenta, deep scarlet.