Thanks. Your comments re Red confirm the drift of Smith's comments: It's not a play. There's probably nothing worse than efforts to sanctify the identity of the artist, to puff up gravitas to point where causes experts like Smith "to cringe" and you to feel discomforted by the talkiness.
Breslin's biography on Rothko is a terrific book and perhaps one of the best biographies of its kind. It certainly set off a wave of similar books, none of which match it in my opinion. It's true that Rothko was given to over-romanticizing his work. He once proudly said that "people cry in front of my work". As Smith said, however, the read drama is the silence and deceptively banal nature of the studio. I often told my students that if they want to be artists they'd need to become very comfortable with extended solitude. In the end, I suppose Red is a dramatization of what goes on in artists' heads as they work. The "assistant" is the muse, the troublesome, annoying muse that speaks the truth to the artist as he needs to indulge belligerent self-deception just to get the work done. I mean the constant ill-tempered badly behaving interrupting anxiety talk in the head as one silently pats away on the canvas. Maybe in that respect Red is good. I'd like to see the play. Maybe I will if it's still running in a month or so. I like your comment regarding the stretching and priming of the canvas. Yep, there is that get it done get it done get it done brain-numbing labor that symbolizes the focus and urgency of the creative work to follow. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, April 5, 2010 3:59:49 PM Subject: Re: "What is happening during an 'a.e.'?" In a message dated 4/5/10 3:28:09 PM, [email protected] writes: > Did you see Roberta Smith's article re the play in today's NYT? What do > you think of it? > I did read it, yes. I basically agree with her. I say "basically" because my reaction to the play was not qualified by insider's knowledge and experience the way hers was. Even as I was watching the play I was imagining how different the viewer-response would be in someone more informed than I. I literally thought of you, William. My guess that one way or another your response would be much more intense than mine -- more intense in either approval or disapproval -- I couldn't be sure which. I WAS sure you'd be more engaged, but of course one can become engaged by rage at what's being presented. I certainly agree with Roberta Smith when she says she liked the silent parts far more than the talky ones. It's an awful truth I have to live with as a playwright that silent moments onstage -- especially silent moments that have activity -- can be immensely effective -- and I have little talent for creating them. I get a modicum of comfort from considering that Shakespeare was even more talky than I, but that comfort is immediately blown away by the very thought of comparison to W.S. There is a brilliant moment in RED when the two men are priming a very large canvas together. We see the frame being constructed, the canvas stretched and attached, then being hoisted into place. Then, in what's almost a balletic race being timed by stop-watches, the two men furiously cover the canvas with a homogeneous reddish-brown undercoat. The only sounds are those from the brushing and tapping the paint cans. When they finished and sagged back abruptly, the audience broke into a burst of applause. It was a fine, vivid, theatrically gripping mini-scene. But I felt RED as a play was bad, a narrative failure. It lacked almost all the essential elements of storytelling. It was only ninety minutes, but it seemed twenty minutes too long: an argument followed by a lecture followed by an argument followed by lecture and so-not-so-forth. The characters were vivid but not nearly three dimensional, there was no conflict, no hurdle to be gotten over. Perhaps if one came to it with a passion for Rothko his angry rants about the "dissonance" between the Appollonian and Dionysian impulse would compel, but to me they felt like near-opaque hell-fire sermons by a nasty guy on a pulpit. It was not what I go to theater for.
