by Dr. David Glen Robinson
Red is a tragedy, make no mistake, but it is one in love with life, and most especially with the color red. As with the very best plays, Red tells everything plainly to the audience. The promotional material for the play is full of piquant quotations from the script, by way of Mark Rothko, the central character. My favorite, not in any of the cut-lines is: “There is tragedy in every brushstroke.”
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| Ryan Crowder, Steven Pounder (photo: Kimberley Mead) |
At the time, it was the most valuable art commission ever, paying $35,000. The commissioner was the architect Philip Johnson through his patron, international modernist architect Mies van der Rohe, perhaps the reigning art god of the twentieth century, who changed history more profoundly even than Picasso.
These were heady times, indeed, a few years past Jackson Pollock’s death (which Rothko insisted was suicide) at a point at which a few thinkers like Rothko saw Pop Art coming to replace all the abstract expressionists and knew it would be a painful death.
Penfold Theatre’s production of Red is a major score; they have captured the Austin premiere of this John Logan play, a Tony award winner, first staged in London in 2009. Penfold treats the play very well, staging it on the thrust stage of the Trinity Street Theatre, on the fourth floor of the First Baptist Church, 901 Trinity St., downtown. Steven Pounders plays Rothko, and Ryan Crowder, producing artistic director of Penfold, plays Ken, Rothko’s newly hired studio assistant. Rothko was known for his acerbic statements about the art world, and many of those comments have found their way into Logan’s script. Rothko was no Oscar Wilde for biting irony and sarcasm, but in his rage he came close.
Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
Arcadia traverses the past and the present in alternating scenes at the same English country home from 1809 to 1993 when academics, mathematicians and literary types of the present seek to uncover a mystery in the home and garden two hundred years earlier. Audiences will be captivated by the whirlwind stirred up by Lord Byron, who is an unseen visitor to the 19th century characters. The parallel lives climax in a masquerade garden party with 20th Century characters waltzing the same moment of transformation with the lovers of the early 19th Century.
Based on the true story of The Bloody Countess, Erzsebet Bathori, this original opera is a tale of horror, murder, and magic created by award-winning Ethos composer and designer Chad Salvata. Vampyress received accolades when it debuted at The Vortex in 2005, including winning B. Iden Payne Awards for Outstanding Original Score (Chad Salvata), Outstanding Lead Actress (Melissa Vogt-Patterson), and Outstanding Supporting Actress (Betsy McCann).
