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The hardwood floor is splattered and stained with hues of dark red paint.

Most importantly, representations of some of Rothko’s magnificent Seagram Mural paintings are stacked and displayed around the room.

KEN And you equate the color black with death?

There is also a phonograph with messy stacks of records.

They’re not like representational pictures, like traditional landscapes or portraits.

We stomped it to death.

FX ROTHKO BUSIES HIMSELF, SORTING BRUSHES, ARRANGING CANVASES, ETC, UNDER SPEECH: ROTHKO We start every morning at nine and work until five.

I do a lot of layers, one after another, like a glaze, slowly building the image, like pentimento, letting the luminescence emerge until it’s done.

Nobody can paint a Cubist picture today.

There is a cluttered counter or tables filled with buckets of paint, tins of turpentine, tubes of glue, crates of eggs, bottles of Scotch, packets of pigment, coffee cans filled with brushes, a portable burner or stovetop, and a phone.

Michelangelo embraced this claustrophobia and created false doors and windows all the way up the walls, rectangles in rich reds and browns ...

We destroyed Cubism, de Kooning and me and Pollock and Barnett Newman and all the others.

More like symbiosis.

I do a lot of layers, one after another, like a glaze, slowly building the image, like pentimento, letting the luminescence emerge until it’s done.

… “All those fuzzy rectangles, my kid could do that in kindergarten, it’s nothing but a scam, this guy’s a fraud.”

FX UGLY FLUORESCENT LIGHTS SIZZLE ON.

When I was young I didn’t know any better so I would haul my supplies out there and the wind would blow the paper and the easel would fall over and the ants would get in the paint.

We are in the perpetual process now: creation, maturation, cessation.

Then he gets into an Oldsmobile convertible and races around these little country roads like a lunatic.

Because Pop Art has banished Abstract Expressionism ...

Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has … listen to me now … significance. (moving off mic) (turning up the lights again) Let’s have the lights back and get rid of — FX SWITCHES OFF THE RECORD PLAYER, AS HE CONTINUES: ROTHKO (off mic) Maybe this is a dinosaur talking. (re-approaching mic) Maybe I’m a dinosaur sucking up the oxygen from you cunning little mammals hiding in the bushes waiting to take over.

On Screen projections: A selection of the Seagram Mural paintings.

The more I looked at it the more it pulsated around me, I was totally saturated, it swallowed me ...

When he got too ill to hold a paint brush he used scissors, cutting up paper and making collages.

You think the multifarious complexities and nuances of the psyche — evolving through countless generations, perverted and demented through social neurosis and personal anguish, molded by faith and lack of faith — can really be so goddamn simple?

It lives … Like one of those bioluminescent fish from the bottom of the ocean, radiating its own effulgence.

He gives it inner luminosity.

Or burnt-umber?

KEN Persimmons.

canvas as quickly as possible — big, horizontal gestures — moving fast to make sure the base layer is even and smooth— Ken does the same for the bottom half of the painting— It is like choreography, they move in sync, they move toward each other and then cross, Rothko lurching back awkwardly as he continues to paint so Ken can dive in under him gracefully as he continues to paint— FX THE PAINT SPLATTERS AND SPLASHES AS THEY DIP THEIR BRUSHES AND ASSAULT THE CANVAS— It is hard, fast,

You think the multifarious complexities and nuances of the psyche — evolving through countless generations, perverted and demented through social neurosis and personal anguish, molded by faith and lack of faith — can really be so goddamn simple?

We exist – all of us, for all time – in a state of perpetual dissonance ...

Sometimes you just want a fucking still life or landscape or soup can or comic book!

I know, those plein air painters, they sing to you endless paeans about the majesty of natural sunlight.

SCENE 1 Onscreen projection Rothko Seagram mural painting FX MUSIC: CONTEMPLATIVE CLASSICAL MUSIC IS PLAYING ON A PHONOGRAPH Rothko stands, on mic. staring forward.

BROAD STOKES He moves very quickly— The following action can be mimed facing the audience; We hear their physical efforts and breathing.

ROTHKO And the perfect life would be perfectly balanced between the two, everlastingly on the fulcrum.

They exist in a state of flux – of movement.

There is one door leading to an unseen vestibule where the characters change into their work clothes and enter and exit the studio.

She snaps for the Maitre ‘D who snaps for the captain who snaps for the head waiter who brings you through the crowd to your table, heads turning, everyone looking at everyone else all the time, like predators — who are you? what are you worth? do I need to fear you? do I need to acquire you?

Seeing it as malevolent is a weird sort of chromatic anthropomorphizing.

KEN Come on, a painter gets older and the color black starts to infuse his work therefore, the cliché declension goes, he’s depressed, he’s fearing death, he’s losing touch, he’s losing relevance, he’s saying goodbye.

ROTHKO Viscera.

But still I hesitated … The very same thoughts: is it corrupt? is it immoral? just feeding the whims of the bourgeoisie? should I do it?

ROTHKO In the National Gallery in London there’s a picture by Rembrandt called “Belshazzar’s Feast” … It’s an Old Testament story from Daniel: Belshazzar, King of Babylon, is giving a feast and he blasphemes, so a divine hand appears and writes some Hebrew words on the wall as a warning … In the painting these words pulsate from the dark canvas like something miraculous.

Polluted now beyond sanitation, beyond hygiene, like the East River, choked with garbage, all that superficial, meaningless sewage right up there on the wall!

Don’t think I don’t have enemies because I do and I don’t just mean the other painters and gallery owners and museum curators and goddamn-son-of-a-bitch-art-critics, not to mention that vast panoply of disgruntled viewers who loathe me and my work because they do not have the heart, nor the patience, nor the capacity, to think, to understand, because they are not human beings, like we talked about, you remember?

I put on my slippers – they were those Neolite ones that look like moccasins.

ROTHKO There’s tragedy in every brush stroke.

SCENE 1 Onscreen projection Rothko Seagram mural painting FX MUSIC: CONTEMPLATIVE CLASSICAL MUSIC IS PLAYING ON A PHONOGRAPH Rothko stands, on mic. staring forward.

—I’ll probably do thirty or forty and then choose which work best, in concert, like a fugue.

Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has … listen to me now … significance. (moving off mic) (turning up the lights again) Let’s have the lights back and get rid of — FX SWITCHES OFF THE RECORD PLAYER, AS HE CONTINUES: ROTHKO (off mic) Maybe this is a dinosaur talking. (re-approaching mic) Maybe I’m a dinosaur sucking up the oxygen from you cunning little mammals hiding in the bushes waiting to take over.

You know, over the fireplace in the penthouse.

FX ROTHKO RUBS HIS RHYTHMICALLY ACROSS HIS HAND, WARMING AND LIMBERING THE BRISTLES.

FX ROTHKO RUBS HIS RHYTHMICALLY ACROSS HIS HAND, WARMING AND LIMBERING THE BRISTLES.

Completely temporal, completely disposable, like Kleenex, like— KEN Like Campbell’s soup, like comic books— ROTHKO You really think Andy Warhol will be hanging in museums in a hundred years?

KEN In your pictures the bold colors are the Dionysian element, kept in check by the strict geometric shapes, the Apollonian element.

Let it wrap its arms around you; let it embrace you, filling even your peripheral vision so nothing else exists or has ever existed or will ever exist.

Rothko had a pulley system that could raise, lower and display several of the paintings simultaneously.

You stand there trying to look so deep when you’re nothing but a solipsistic bully with your grandiose self-importance and lectures and arias and let’s-look-at-the-fucking-canvas-for-another-few-weeks-let’s-not-fucking-paint-let’s-just-look.

Beets.

You think the multifarious complexities and nuances of the psyche — evolving through countless generations, perverted and demented through social neurosis and personal anguish, molded by faith and lack of faith — can really be so goddamn simple?

Pomegranates.

No cognition.

KEN Come on, a painter gets older and the color black starts to infuse his work therefore, the cliché declension goes, he’s depressed, he’s fearing death, he’s losing touch, he’s losing relevance, he’s saying goodbye.

RED by John Logan LATW PERFORMANCE Script 2/21/2013 CHARACTERS: MARK ROTHKO KEN SETTING: Rothko’s studio 222 Bowery New York City Circa 1958-1960 Rothko’s studio is an old gymnasium.

Anthropology.

An intake of breath ROTHKO (filling himself with the work) My first murals ...

My sister … she’s standing in a puddle of pee.

ROTHKO (not calling to him any more) You’ll help me stretch the canvases and mix the paints and clean the brushes and build the stretchers and move the paintings and also help apply the ground color – which is not painting, so any lunatic assumptions you make in that direction you need to banish immediately.

He illuminates the picture from within!

KEN You’re just mad because the Barbarians are at the gate.

ROTHKO How can it not be the right place for them when they are being created specifically for that place? (moving off) Sometimes your logic baffles me.

They float in space, they breathe … Movement, communication, gesture, flux, interaction; letting them work … They’re not dead because they’re not static.

We seek to capture the ephemeral, the miraculous, and put it onto canvas, stopping time but, like an entomologist pinning a butterfly, it dies when we try ….

Imagine a frieze all around the room, a continuous narrative filling the walls, one to another, each a new chapter, the story unfolding, look and they are there, inescapable and inexorable, like doom.

ROTHKO His muse evacuated.

We went to Portland, lived in the ghetto alongside all the other thinky, talky Jews.

You think the multifarious complexities and nuances of the psyche — evolving through countless generations, perverted and demented through social neurosis and personal anguish, molded by faith and lack of faith — can really be so goddamn simple?

A place where the viewer could live in contemplation with the work and give it some of the same attention and care I gave it.

Suddenly he’s a commodity.

They float in space, they breathe … Movement, communication, gesture, flux, interaction; letting them work … They’re not dead because they’re not static.

FX SMALL BURNER HEATING LIQUID FX LIQUID BEING STIRRED IN LARGE POT.

Every night the drinking and the talking and the fighting and the dancing and the staying up late; like everyone’s romantic idea of what an artist ought to be: the anti-Rothko ...

ROTHKO Go find a psychiatrist and quit whining to me about it, your neediness bores me— KEN (explodes) Bores you?!

… “All those fuzzy rectangles, my kid could do that in kindergarten, it’s nothing but a scam, this guy’s a fraud.”

FX MUSIC CHET BAKER JAZZ RECORD PLAYS ON PHONOGRAPH.

ROTHKO You don’t understand my intention— KEN Your intention is immaterial.

You see the dark rectangle, like a doorway, an aperture, yes, but it’s also a gaping mouth letting out a silent howl of something feral and foul and primal and REAL.

The second we’re born we squall, we writhe, we squirm; to live is to move.

– The talking-talking-talking-jesus-christ-won’t-he-ever-shut-up titanic self-absorption of the man!

So back and forth we go, myth to myth, pulsating.

ROTHKO Not like you usually look at things, like an overeager undergraduate— KEN I have.

ROTHKO Tragic.

KEN Burglars, I found out.

The palate fades and we race to catch it before it’s gone.

You see the dark rectangle, like a doorway, an aperture, yes, but it’s also a gaping mouth letting out a silent howl of something feral and foul and primal and REAL.

The more I looked at it the more it pulsated around me, I was totally saturated, it swallowed me ...

Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has … listen to me now … significance. (moving off mic) (turning up the lights again) Let’s have the lights back and get rid of — FX SWITCHES OFF THE RECORD PLAYER, AS HE CONTINUES: ROTHKO (off mic) Maybe this is a dinosaur talking. (re-approaching mic) Maybe I’m a dinosaur sucking up the oxygen from you cunning little mammals hiding in the bushes waiting to take over.

Not on the spectrum, but in reality.

(Rothko roams, disturbed, trying to recover his equilibrium.)

ROTHKO No, you don’t understand— KEN It’s a fancy restaurant in a big high rise owned by a rich corporation, what don’t I understand?

ROTHKO Lava.

He goes out and paints the most ecstatic yellows and blues known to man — then shoots himself ...

(He continues, angry and derisive:) Matisse the Dying Hero, struggling with his last puny gasp to create that final masterpiece ...

Mythology.

KEN Dark and light, order and chaos, existing at the same time in the same plain, pulsing back and forth ...

ROTHKO It’s not really conflict.

… Just like that I’m a noun.

KEN They were murdered.

They have done this many times, it is a well-practiced ritual.)

A place of communion.

They’re not like representational pictures, like traditional landscapes or portraits.

Be a human being, that’s all I can say.

Atomic flash.

And Jackson Pollock the Beautiful Doomed Youth, dying like Chatterton in his classic Pieta-pose … And Van Gogh, of course Van Gogh, trotted out on all occasions, the ubiquitous symbol for everything, Van Gogh the Misunderstood Martyr — You insult these men by reducing them to your own adolescent stereotypes.

KEN Bones, skeletons ...

Working together, moving in rhythm, whispering to each other, they will still create a place.

If there is photograph of a group hung together, that could be the final projection at the very end of the play.

With theatrical panache, Rothko waits for the exact moment the music thunders most dramatically and then— FX MUSIC THUNDERS DRAMATICALLY ROTHKO Now!

Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has … listen to me now … significance. (moving off mic) (turning up the lights again) Let’s have the lights back and get rid of — FX SWITCHES OFF THE RECORD PLAYER, AS HE CONTINUES: ROTHKO (off mic) Maybe this is a dinosaur talking. (re-approaching mic) Maybe I’m a dinosaur sucking up the oxygen from you cunning little mammals hiding in the bushes waiting to take over.

Let’s prime the canvas.

Which you might learn if you ever actually left your goddamn hermetically-sealed submarine here with all the windows closed and no natural light – BECAUSE NATURAL LIGHT ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU!

There is also an imaginary painting “hanging” right in front of the audience, which Rothko studies throughout the play.

The normal light returns.

You know Mister Philip Johnson, the world-renowned architect?

KEN In your pictures the bold colors are the Dionysian element, kept in check by the strict geometric shapes, the Apollonian element.

But still I hesitated … The very same thoughts: is it corrupt? is it immoral? just feeding the whims of the bourgeoisie? should I do it?

I go to the Santa Maria del Popolo to see Caravaggio’s “Conversion of Saul,” which turns out is tucked away in a dark corner of this dark church with no natural light.

HOLD UNDER DIALOGUE.

Theology.

We’re a smirking nation, living under the tyranny of “fine.”

ROTHKO How can it not be the right place for them when they are being created specifically for that place? (moving off) Sometimes your logic baffles me.

… “All those fuzzy rectangles, my kid could do that in kindergarten, it’s nothing but a scam, this guy’s a fraud.”

Imagine a frieze all around the room, a continuous narrative filling the walls, one to another, each a new chapter, the story unfolding, look and they are there, inescapable and inexorable, like doom.

FX THERE IS THE SOUND OF A DOOR OPENING.

Museums are nothing but mausoleums, galleries are run by pimps and swindlers, and art collectors are nothing but shallow social-climbers.

—I’ll probably do thirty or forty and then choose which work best, in concert, like a fugue.

ROTHKO I’m painting a series of murals now – (he gestures all around) These.

That’s just a personal reaction.

Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has … listen to me now … significance. (moving off mic) (turning up the lights again) Let’s have the lights back and get rid of — FX SWITCHES OFF THE RECORD PLAYER, AS HE CONTINUES: ROTHKO (off mic) Maybe this is a dinosaur talking. (re-approaching mic) Maybe I’m a dinosaur sucking up the oxygen from you cunning little mammals hiding in the bushes waiting to take over.

I’m not building a whole artistic sensibility around it.

It’s like under the ocean it’s so goddamn dark.

Most importantly, representations of some of Rothko’s magnificent Seagram Mural paintings are stacked and displayed around the room.

Still, they buy it … It’s an investment … It’s screwing the neighbors … It’s buying class … It’s buying taste … It goes with the lamp … It’s cheaper than a Pollock … It’s interior decoration … It’s anything but what it is.

We put on the funny nose and glasses and slip on the banana peel and the TV makes everything happy and everyone’s laughing all the time, it’s all so goddamn funny, it’s our constitutional right to be amused all the time, isn’t it?