Seeing Red, talking art

THEATER
Red
The Necessary Theatre
Starring Bart Guingona,
JC Santos
June 16-18
Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat. & Sun., 3:30 and 8 p.m.
PETA Theater Center, Eynmard Dr., New Manila, Quezon City

JOHN LOGAN’S straight play Red does a better job of introducing painter Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism, and the angst of artists than Clement Greenberg’s criticism ever will.

A decade after he first played Rothko in Logan’s two-hander, Bart Guingona reprises the role of the art-world giant known for painting rectangles floating in color fields, for expressing big emotions through pigments, for withdrawing his Seagram murals from the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City because he couldn’t bear to see his work as the background for clinking silverware and idle chatter, and for offing himself in 1970.

Mr. Guingona, who called Rothko “a genius asshole” in 2013, has more sympathy for the artist, who, along with the likes of Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, wished to convey “tragedy, ecstasy, and doom” through color.

“This is a much deeper etching of the play because I think I understand now: He protected his work like they were his children. [Painting] is like getting a piece of your flesh, of yourself, and putting it out there unprotected. And you need to protect it — that never occurred to me before,” said Mr. Guingona, who now plays “a more nuanced version” of the genius asshole and academic snob. “He had to be the way he was because he was protecting his creation.”

Opposite Mr. Guingona is JC Santos, who plays Rothko’s fictional assistant, Ken, with the eager vulnerability of a puppy exposing its soft underbelly to its master, hungry for attention and tummy rubs. This dynamic, more avuncular than antagonistic, sets up a different emotional payoff than the 2013 version which featured Joaquin Valdes, whose onstage chemistry with Mr. Guingona had all the fragility “two alpha males” butting heads, as the veteran actor put it.

“[JC’s Ken] is a child,” said Mr. Guingona. “You see Rothko as cruel, particularly to someone who’s so open. When the play shifts later on, the tenderness becomes even more pronounced.”

The two go back-and-forth for 90 minutes, without intermission, trading barbs and monologues in vivid language as when Rothko and Ken play a word association game sparked by the color red. Found in scene 2, this verbal fillip is populated by persimmons and pomegranates, flame and dead Fauvists, Santa Claus and Satan, showcasing how Logan’s concrete writing is far more accessible than Greenberg’s critic-speak. (To wit: “Newman and Rothko turn away from the painterliness of Abstract Expressionism as though to save the objects of painterliness — color and openness — from painterliness itself. This is why their art could be called a synthesis of painterly and non-painterly or, better, a transcending of the differences between the two.”)

Mr. Guingona and Mr. Santos took a crash course in art history to prepare for Red, bringing back memories of their formal training in theater arts (Mr. Guingona studied directing in London; Mr. Santos, acting in New York City).

“You come into class, you have books that you have to read and all the theories are there,” said Mr. Guingona. “The beauty of that is that once you know all the theories and you put them into practice, you can just toss the books out. It becomes second nature.”

Red is an example of how diverse voices enrich the conversation. Those who are baffled by the syntax of art exhibition text — distinct enough to be given a name (International Art English) and parodied — will find an alternative in Logan’s play, which rarely, if ever, lapses into nominalizations and jargon.

The more doorways to enter the wonderful, crazy world of art, the better.

Nan Z. Da, an English professor at the University of Notre Dame, talked about “curious crossings” in a piece about “preserving the generic, categorical distinctions that separate different forms of writing”: “Academic writing has to look different than nonfiction writing, has to look different than journalism, and so forth, for much the same reason that interdisciplinarity means nothing if disciplines don’t have operational closure, don’t have integrity. You have to have categorical and systemic partitioning, even hard generic distinctions, in order to see curious crossings.” (Nan Z. Da and Jessica Swoboda, “Curious Crossings: A conversation with Nan Z. Da,” The Point, April 19, 2022, thepointmag.com/dialogue/curious-crossings/).

And to borrow from the Tony Award-winning play itself, these different registers are not in conflict but in symbiosis: “They need each other. Dionysus’ passion is focused — is made bearable — by Apollo’s will to form. In fact, the only way we can endure the sheer ferocity of Dionysus’ emotion is because we have the control and intelligence of Apollo, otherwise the emotion would overwhelm us.”

For Mr. Santos, who is the reason that Red is back on stage after 10 years, the play is a shot in the arm for those who languished over the pandemic: “I want this to be a reminder for us — and for other artists — to be inspired again.”

Prior to joining a contemporary art museum and a small independent press as a publishing consultant, Sam L. Marcelo was a reporter and editor at BusinessWorld.