BWW Reviews: Salt Lake Acting Company’s RED illuminates and intrigues, through March 4

At the opening scene of the Salt Lake Acting Company’s expert staging of RED, Morgan Lund as the abstract-impressionist painter Mark Rothko carefully examines the large artwork hanging at the center of his cluttered Manhattan studio. He tilts his head and ponders. He steps away to look at the canvas from a different angle, examining, critiquing and brooding.

When Ted Powell enters the set playing Rothko’s fictional new assistant, Ken, the artist asks, “What do you see?’

“Red” is the young man’s one-word response.

But by the end of the production, Ken will observe a broad spectrum of colors, each with an intensity all its own. And the audience will also see beyond the canvas surface as we are challenged to re-evaluate the creative process behind a wholly original piece of art.

As Rotko says, “I’m here to stop your heart. I’m here to make you think. I’m not here to make pretty pictures.”

John Logan is well-known for the screenplays of GLADIATOR, THE AVIATOR and most recently Martin Scorsese’s HUGO. But RED, which was first produced by the Donmar Warehouse in London, is his Broadway play that earned the 2010 Tony Award for Best Play and six other statues. Logan wrote NEVER THE SINNER, about the Leopold and Loeb case, and HAUPTMANN, about the Lindbergh baby killer, before heading to Hollywood. But after collaborating with Stephen Sondheim to adapt his SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET for the big screen, he followed Sondheim’s advice that “the theater needs playwrights” and authored RED.

Te two-man, five-scene play covers a handful of days with Rothko and his apprentice as the master begins the art world’s largest commission: murals for the Four Seasons restaurant on Park Avenue as it was being designed in 1958.

The finely crafted play includes some of Rotko’s own words, including his intent that the series of vast murals would “ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment.”

Keven Myhre, one of the executive producers of the highly regarded Salt Lake Acting Company, provides enlightening direction and beautifully serves the RED material. Myhre has directed a wide range of productions over the nonprofit theater’s history of 41 years.

There is splendid acting in the back-and-forth interactions between the two characters. Lund plays Rothko’s temperamental personality with a powder-keg intensity. The audience sees the deep compulsion and inner pain of the tunnel-visioned artist who committed suicide at age 66. As the challenging young aide, Powell grows in stature as his character begins to defy the master. Both are bravura performances.

Myhre also designed the set, a recreation of Rothko’s famously dimly lit studio. It is terrifically brought to life by Jesse Portillo’s lighting, which doesn’t draw too much attention to itself.

The Salt Lake Acting Company presents RED by John Logan, directed by Keven Myhre, with Morgan Lund as Rotko and Ted Powell as Ken, through March 4, 801-363-7522 or saltlakeactingcompany.org.

Caption: Morgan Lund as the painter Mark Rothko and Ted Powell as his assistant Ken in the Salt Lake Acting Company’s RED. (Photo David Daniels of dav.d photography)

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