Seeing Red


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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT WEEK OF MARCH 7-13, 2012

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A GUIDE TO THE GREATER FORT MYERS ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT SCENE

Meet and dine with top authors

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SPECIAL TO FLORIDA WEEKLY _________________________

The Evening with the Authors, where people can enjoy meeting, talking one-on-one and dining with their favorite best-selling authors, takes place at 6 p.m. Friday, March 16, at the Helm Club at the Landings in Fort Myers. The evening includes a cocktail reception and plated dinner with the 20-plus authors who will headline the Southwest Florida Reading Festival the next day. The ticket price is $45 and reservations are required. The deadline for reservations is 5 p.m. Friday, March 9. Go to www.readfest.org and select Evening with the Authors to make a reservation. The dinner will honor author Michael Palmer with the Distinguished Author Award for his literary contributions and his community involvement. The evening is sponsored by Books-A-Million. The Reading Festival is completely

SEEING

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Authors appearing at Evening with the Authors ADULT: ■ Diana Abu-Jaber “Birds of Paradise,” “Origin,” “The Language of Baklava” ■ Lisa Black “Defensive Wounds,” “Evidence of Murder’ ■ Deborah Crombie “No Mark Upon Her,” “Necessary As Blood” ■ Jane Green “Another Piece of My Heart,” “Jemima J” ■ Iris Johansen “Eve Duncan” series, “Shadow Zone” ■ Roy Johansen “Shadow Zone,” “Storm Cycle” ■ Alex Kava “Maggie O’Dell” series, “One False Move” ■ Erik Larson “In the Garden of Beasts,” “Devil in the White City” ■ Michael Palmer “Oath of Office,” “A Heartbeat Away” ■ Erica Spindler “Watch Me Die,” “Breakneck” ■ Caroline Todd “A Lonely Death: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery” ■ Thrity Umrigar “The World We Found,” “The Space Between Us” ■ Zane “Addicted,” “The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth”

BY NANCY STETSON nstetson@floridaweekly.com

“What does ‘red’ mean to me? You mean scarlet? You mean crimson? You mean plum-mulberry-magentaburgundy-salmon-carmine-carnelian-coral?” — Mark Rothko in “Red”

Florida Rep brings Mark Rothko and his paintings to the stage

THOSE WHO WORK IN THEATER WILL TELL Each play they produce contains its own set of challenges. But in presenting “Red,” the 2010 Tony Award-winning play about abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, Florida Repertory Theatre staffers faced a set of unique challenges: Not only did they have to transform the stage into an artist’s studio, but they had to crestud ate artwork that would look similar to Rothko’s, yet not sim be reproductions. And the actors in this two-man play act also have to do a credible als job of painting on stage. Bill McNulty, who portrays the late artist, contr fesses he’s “hardly ever held fe a paintbrush in my hand.” Fellow actor David McElF wee, who plays Rothko’s w young assistant, Ken, says y tthe role’s painting requirement was one of the big m

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Actors Bill McNulty and David McElwee rehearse for “Red.”

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“Red”

>> When: Through March 25 (previews March 7-8) >> Where: Florida Repertory Theatre at the Arcade Theatre, downtown Fort Myers >> Cost: $40 and $45 ($20 and $25 for previews) >> Info: 332-4488 or www.floridarep.org >> More: Florida Rep’s production of “Red” will be performed in the Daniels Pavilion at the Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Naples March 27-31. Tickets are $49 and can be purchased by calling 597-1900.

see the space become more and more claustrophobic, as the work compiles around them. The dramatic tension is building, and hopefully, by the end of the play, we’ve confined the space to help add to that tension. What’s closing them in is more and more of his paintings.”

Painting the canvases

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The play calls for actors to use real paint to simulate Mark Rothko’s work on stage.

RED From page 1 draws that made him want to perform in “Red.” “I saw it on Broadway in 2010 and I thought how fun it would be to do all that painting on stage in front of an audience,” Mr. McElwee says. The two practiced “painting” in rehearsals, miming the action under the guidance of director Robert Cacioppo. Then they visited Florida Rep’s paint shop. “This is the first time where actors have come out to the shop to learn to paint,” says scenic artist Erin McCourt. She notes that there’s a scene in the one-act show where Rothko and his assistant put the first layer of plum-red paint on a 6-by-6-foot canvas in a minute and a half. She worked with the two, showing them the proper way to hold a paintbrush and the best way to put the base coat onto the canvas. “This is more hands-on than I typically am with a play,” she says. Mr. McNulty says he and Mr. McElwee have been somewhat surprised by how well they’ve done with the painting part of their roles. “We manage to splatter ourselves,” he says. “Mostly, it gets on David, because he’s the guy doing the lower part of the painting. Rothko is not a man who’s terribly concerned about things like splattering his assistant. “David ends up looking like he’s been through the war. It’s red paint, very effective. Later on, he has a speech about how his parents were murdered, finding them in their bedroom, having been stabbed — a lot of bloody images. The paint on him works metaphorically for that speech. “A lot of different meanings of ‘red’ are being explored as the play goes on, one being blood, another being just simply what the color means to painters: Why do you use red as part of a color scheme in a painting?”

The meaning of red

The play is set in 1958 and 1959, when Rothko was going through a period where red and shades of red were important to his work. The artist was working with red contrasted with black,

and “the feeling you get from the two colors and from (their) juxtaposition,” Mr. McNulty says. “You might think of red, for example, as the life force, and black as the encroaching death or abyss, whatever you think happens after life,” he explains. “Or you may think of red as hope, or as something really threatening, something discomforting, like blood.” In addition to the two actors starting a painting, Mr. McElwee, as the assistant, has to construct some canvases on stage, building a frame and stretching a canvas. “We recreate a lot of the processes Rothko would use in his studio,” he says. “I think it’ll be fun for the audience to see the work that artists do,” Mr. McNulty says. “Throughout the play we are really quite busy stretching canvases and mixing paint, doing the day-to-day physical work. We even actually prime a canvas.” To prime a canvas, he says, you have to move quickly, and get it all done within four or five minutes, before the gesso dries. “It has to dry evenly. The audience gets to see (us do) that. “I think there’s a fascination with watching people work, especially on stage, to see people actually working at something, and (seeing) what goes into the process of anybody’s work place.” That’s the great thing about being an actor, he adds: In just about any play he’s in, he learns something new. “You’re going to get an education, you’re going to find out how people live — or if it’s an historical play, how they lived. In a play about a painter, you’re

going to find out what that life is like. “A life in the theater is an ongoing education. I feel like I never got out of graduate school; it’s like I have a seminar every day. It makes life interesting.”

Set poses challenges

For set designer Richard Crowell, creating the set for “Red” made life very interesting indeed. The play is specific about what you can and can’t represent on stage, he says. “I can’t try to duplicate the work and show it face-on,” he says. “It has to be at a pretty extreme angle… and at a forced perspective,” meaning that the paintings are actually trapezoids, not rectangles or squares. In that way, he explains, it makes both the room and the paintings look larger. “It’s a trick thing designers do, forcing the perspective,” he says. “It makes the diminishing point seem a lot farther away than it is.” He also had to design a set that looked like Rothko’s studio, which was an old gymnasium in the Bowery in New York City. “When you walk into the theater, you’ve never seen it like this,” Mr. Crowell says. “I’m asking them to strip the theater as much as they can, remove all the curtains, all the masking — all the things that keep you from seeing backstage. Instead of putting up a gymnasium, we’re going to let the theater work as his work space.” The paintings are suspended on steel hangers. “It’s a very active play,” he says, “and the actors sort of help create the space. Throughout the course of the play, you

Written by John Logan, “Red” covers the time in Rothko’s life where he was commissioned to do a series of paintings for the elite Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram building on Park Avenue in New York City. Ms. McCourt, the scenic artist, had to create Rothko-like paintings in a similar style and color scheme to make them believable as paintings from the artist’s Seagram collection. To prepare, she spent weeks studying his work. Mr. Crowell gave her color swatches and suggestions for how he visualized them, but he wanted her to “figure out what I wanted to do to bring to life these giants from these little samples,” she says. “None of them were straight red. There were maroon tones, pink tones. The idea was interesting: There’s not a single color you would look at and say, ‘Oh, that’s the color red.’ There are shades of red, but straight red isn’t anywhere in this show.” Painting the canvases was unlike anything she’s done for Florida Rep before, she says. Typically, she builds sets — creates a character’s living room or bedroom, for example. For this show, she adds, she got to spend several days just with the paint and the canvases. Nothing else. “I got back to my roots of being a painter more than a scenic artist,” she says, adding, “This is definitely a show for a painter. If there was ever a show where I felt I got to rise to the occasion, this is the one.”

‘Mozart on canvas’

Rothko painted rectangular blocks of color, skillfully using optic techniques. According to Mr. McNulty, “If you stand there and let it work on you, those blocks of color will start to move. You’ll see them as in motion. They’ll either recede from you, or feel as if they’re coming forward. You’ll get this pulsing effect between various colors and shapes.” The artist, he says, hopes to communicate emotion with colors, in much the same way that a piece of music communicates emotions with the variations of tone and rhythm. Before rehearsals, Mr. McElwee took a trip to Washington, D.C., to see some of the Seagram murals at the National Gallery. “When I walked into the room where they were on display, I had an immediate feeling somewhere between horror and ecstasy,” he says. “A lot of them look like big mouths. They’ve been compared to tombs. He really used so many layers that they just glow, they come off the canvas. “Since I saw ‘Red’ on Broadway, Rothko’s work has really opened up to me. I think they’re just the most beautiful things. Seeing the paintings is like Mozart on canvas.” ■

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WEEK OF MARCH 14-20, 2012

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THEATER REVIEW A marvelous ‘Red’ that doesn’t match your sofa nancySTETSON [email protected]

There’s a moment in “Red” when William McNulty, as the painter Mark Rothko, roars at his young assistant: “I AM HERE TO STOP YOUR HEART, YOU UNDERSTAND THAT? I AM HERE TO MAKE YOU THINK! …I AM NOT HERE TO MAKE PRETTY PICTURES!” It’s about as clear and succinct an artist’s statement as you’ll ever get. The paintings of Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko weren’t “pretty.” He didn’t want to make art to hang over the mantle or match the sofa or someone’s Sherwin-Williams paint chip. At one point, he describes his paintings as “a gaping mouth letting out a silent howl of something feral and foul and primal and REAL.” The same could be said for John Logan’s 2010 Tony Award-winning play, “Red,” at Florida Repertory Theatre through March 25. The play is heart-stopping, thoughtprovoking, challenging and complex. Within its jam-packed 90 minutes it deals with, among other things, art versus commerce, the creative process, mentoring and proteges, Abstract Expressionism versus Pop Art, the myriad ways of looking at color, art as a daily discipline versus the creative impulse, and the way younger generations strive to surpass their elders. It name drops everyone from Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Turner and Matisse to Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and yes, Robert Rauschenberg.

What do you see? Set in Rothko’s studio in the Bowery in the late 1950s, “Red” opens with Ken (David McElwee) showing up in a gray suit on his first day as Rothko’s assistant. He’s nervous, anxious to please and more than a little awe-struck by the great artist. Before he can speak, Rothko plants him in front of one of his paintings. “What do you see?” he asks. This is what all artists ask themselves, and then, through their work, ask us. Great art, whether painting or play or book, opens our eyes and helps us see anew. There’s a wonderful lyrical scene early in the play when the two free-associate

different kind of reds, naming everything from lava to Dorothy’s ruby slippers to a robe in an El Greco painting. It’s a riotous recitation and celebration of red, an insight into how artists see. While a regular person will look and proclaim something simply “red,” artists see the color in all its myriad hues and shades. In this fictionalized portrait of real art history, Rothko has just accepted a commission to make a series of paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram building on New York City’s Park Avenue, designed by Philip Johnson and Mies Van der Rohe. He’ll paint 30 to 40 works, then select a number of them to “work in concert, like a fugue.” But this great honor turns sour the more Rothko thinks about it, and his relationship with his young assistant causes him to reexamine his motivations.

Roberta Malcolm’s costumes are on the money: 50s-style jeans and sneakers, paint-spattered work clothes, and Rothko’s black hat and suit for the “outside world.” Richard Crowell’s set is a realistic art studio, complete with seven naked light bulbs, bare brick walls, wooden worktables with coffee cans filled with the ubiquitous paint brushes. As the play progresses, the space grows more and more crowded with oversized painted canvases. Todd O. Wren’s lighting is especially noteworthy in this play, particularly because Rothko was so keen on his paintings receiving the proper lighting so that they could appear to pulsate and breathe. Florida Rep Producing Artistic Director Robert Cacioppo has directed “Red” so well that it appears to have not been directed at all; it’s as if we’re peeking in on two artists in a studio in New York’s lower East Side as they’re going about their work. “Red,” which closed on Broadway in June 2010, is one of the top-produced regional plays this season, All the right and it’s easy to see why. It’s so rich in ideas, a feast for shades both the mind and heart. It’s Mr. McNulty is a COURTESY PHOTO overwhelmingly powerful. force to be reckoned Actors Bill McNulty and David McElwee rehearse for “Red.” Just like Rothko’s paintwith on stage. His ings, “Red” is something to spend time Rothko is brawny and blustery, a man always striving. Mr. McElwee is also well cast as Roth- with, to mull over, to contemplate. full of passion and conflicted feelings. ko’s assistant. His character starts out The more you look, the more you see. ■ He rails against easy answers, against patrons who want art to match the sofa, gawky and awkward and slowly gains against gallery owners and ignorant art confidence as the play progresses. He’s critics, against the commodification of young and earnest, gradually finding his own voice and point of view. art. Playwright John Logan gives us five He warns Ken in the beginning that “Red” he’s not his rabbi or father or teacher, yet scenes, each building on the previous >>When: Through March 25 he can’t help pontificating. He’s so full ones, yet each complete in itself, like a >>Where: Florida Repertory Theatre, downtown of knowledge, so chockfull of opinions Rothko painting. In addition to giving Fort Myers us insight into the creative process, he and philosophies, that they just flow out >>Cost: $40 and $45 shows us artists at work onstage: building of him. >>Info: 332-4488 or www.floridarep.org frames, stretching canvas, mixing paint, Mr. McNulty gives us a totally believ>>Note: From March 27-31, “Red” will play at able Rothko, right down to his immigrant/ putting a base coat on a canvas. the Daniels Pavilion at the Naples Philharmonic Mr. McElwee is constantly in motion, child-of-immigrants New York accent. Center for the Arts. Tickets for $49 can be even moving props during the scene We believe this man is Rothko: diffipurchased by calling 597-1900. cult, exasperating, talented. And striving, changes.

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