SCENE TWO
ROTHKO stands starting at the central painting; the audience.
Classical music plays from the phonograph. (ROTHKO favoured Mozart and Schubert.)
KEN enters. He carries bags of Chinese takeout food. He now wears work clothes splattered with paint and glue. Months have passed and he is more comfortable here.
KEN puts a handful of change into an empty coffee can and then unloads the cartons of food.
ROTHKO muses.
ROTHKO: Rembrandt and Rothko… Rembrandt and Rothko… Rothko and Rembrandt… Rothko and Rembrandt… And Turner. Rothko and Rembrandt and Turner… Rothko and Rembrandt and Turner –
KEN: – Oh my.
Beat.
ROTHKO lights a cigarette.
KEN: The Chinese place is closing.
ROTHKO: Everything worthwhile ends. We are in the perpetual process now: creation, maturation, cessation.
KEN: There’s another Chinese round the corner.
ROTHKO: The eternal cycles grind on, generations pass away, hope turns arid, but there’s another Chinese round the corner.
KEN: Not much for small talk.
ROTHKO: It’s small.
He joins KEN. He stands and eats Chinese food messily with a fork through the following.
KEN: I went to the Modern last night, saw the Picasso show.
ROTHKO: And?
KEN: I don’t think he’s so much concerned with generations passing away.
ROTHKO: Don’t kid yourself, kid. That man – though now a charlatan of course signing menus for money like Dali, when he’s not making ugly little pots, also for money – that man at his best understood the workings of time… Where’s the receipt?
KEN gives him the receipt for the Chinese food.
ROTHKO puts it into a shoebox filled with other receipts as he continues without stopping.
ROTHKO: Tragic, really, to grow superfluous in your own lifetime. We destroyed Cubism, de Kooning and me and Pollock and Barnett Newman and all the others. We stomped it to death. Nobody can paint a Cubist picture today.
KEN: You take pride in that. ‘Stomping’ Cubism to death.
ROTHKO: The child must banish the father. Respect him, but kill him.
KEN: And enjoy it?
ROTHKO: Doesn’t matter. Just be audacious and do it… Courage in painting isn’t facing the blank canvas, it’s facing Manet, it’s facing Velasquez. All we can do is move beyond what was there, to what is here, and hope to get some intimation of what will be here. ‘What is past and passing and to come.’ That’s Yeats, whom you haven’t read.
KEN: Come on, but Picasso –
ROTHKO tries another carton of food, keeps eating.
ROTHKO: Picasso I thank for teaching me that movement is everything! Movement is life. The second we’re born we squall, we writhe, we squirm; to live is to move. Without movement paintings are what?
KEN: Dead?
ROTHKO: Precisely… (He gestures to his paintings.) Look at the tension between the blocks of color: the dark and the light, the red and the black and the brown. They exist in a state of flux – of movement. They abut each other on the actual canvas, so too do they abut each other in your eye. They ebb and flow and shift, gently pulsating. The more you look at them the more they move… They float in space, they breathe… Movement, communication, gesture, flux, interaction; letting them work… They’re not dead because they’re not static. They move through space if you let them, this movement takes time, so they’re temporal. They require time.
KEN: They demand it. They don’t work without it.
ROTHKO: This is why it’s so important to me to create a place. A place the viewer can contemplate the paintings over time and let them move.
KEN: (Excited.) They need the viewer. They’re not like representational pictures, like traditional landscapes or portraits.
ROTHKO: Tell me why.
KEN: Because they change, they move, they pulse. Representational pictures are unchanging; they don’t require the active participation of the viewer. Go to the Louvre in the middle of the night and the ‘Mona Lisa’ will still be smiling. But do these paintings still pulse when they’re alone?
KEN is lost in thought.
ROTHKO watches him, pleased.
KEN: That’s why you keep the lights so low.
ROTHKO: Is it?
KEN: To help the illusion. Like a magician. Like a play. To keep it mysterious, to let the pictures pulsate. Turn on bright lights and the stage effect is ruined – suddenly it’s nothing but a bare stage with a bunch of fake walls.
KEN goes to the light switches. He snaps on all the lights. Ugly fluorescent lights sizzle on. The room immediately loses its magic.
ROTHKO: What do you see?
KEN: My eyes are adjusting… Just… White.
ROTHKO: What does white make you think of?
KEN: Bones, skeletons… Charnel house… Anemia… Cruelty.
ROTHKO is surprised by this response.
ROTHKO: Really?
KEN: It’s like an operating theatre now.
ROTHKO: How does white make you feel?
KEN: Frightened?
ROTHKO: Why?
KEN: Doesn’t matter.
ROTHKO: Why?
KEN: It’s like the snow…outside the room where my parents died. It was winter. I remember the snow outside the window: white… (Turns his attention to the paintings.) And the pictures in this light… They’re flat. Vulgar… This light hurts them.
ROTHKO turns off the fluorescent lights.
The normal light returns.
ROTHKO: You see how it is with them? How vulnerable they are?… People think I’m controlling: controlling the light; controlling the height of the pictures; controlling the shape of the gallery… It’s not controlling, it’s protecting. A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It’s a risky act to send it out into the world.
KEN tosses away the cartons of food and straightens up.
ROTHKO puts on a new classical record. Moves back to studying his central painting.
A beat as the mood settles.
KEN: You ever paint outdoors?
ROTHKO: You mean out in nature?
KEN: Yeah.
ROTHKO: Nature doesn’t work for me. The light’s no good.
KEN is amused.
ROTHKO: All those bugs – ach! I know, those plein air painters, they sing to you endless paeans about the majesty of natural sunlight. Get out there and muck around in the grass, they tell you, like a cow. 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. Oy… But then I go to Rome for the first time. 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. It’s like a cave. But the painting glowed! With a sort of rapture it glowed. Consider: Caravaggio was commissioned to paint the picture for this specific place, he had no choice. He stands there and he looks around. It’s like under the ocean it’s so goddamn dark. How’s he going to paint here? He turns to his creator: ‘God, help me, unworthy sinner that I am. Tell me, O Lord on High, what the fuck do I do now?!’
KEN laughs.
ROTHKO: Then it comes to him: the divine spark. He illuminates the picture from within! He gives it inner luminosity. It lives… Like one of those bioluminescent fish from the bottom of the ocean, radiating its own effulgence. You understand? Caravaggio was –
He abruptly stops.
KEN looks at him.
Beat.
ROTHKO stares at his painting.
He tilts his head.
Like he’s listening.
Like he’s seeing something new in the painting.
ROTHKO: Bring me the second bucket.
KEN, excited, brings him a brush and a bucket of dark, maroon paint.
KEN: Are you really going to paint?
ROTHKO: What the hell do you think I have been doing?!
KEN retreats.
He watches ROTHKO closely.
ROTHKO dips the five-inch housepainter’s brush into the paint.
He’s ready.
Then he stands there, frozen.
Just his eyes move craftily over the canvas.
Paint drips.
KEN is breathless.
ROTHKO is coiled.
He tilts his head, studying, adjudicating.
He considers the color of the paint in the bucket. Needs something.
ROTHKO: Gimme black number four and the first maroon.
KEN brings some powdered pigments in old jars.
ROTHKO instructs, still barely moving. His eyes dart from the bucket of paint to the canvas.
ROTHKO: A pinch of black.
KEN adds a bit of black pigment, stirs it carefully.
ROTHKO: Just that amount again.
KEN adds a bit more, keeps stirring.
ROTHKO: Twice as much maroon.
KEN adds some maroon pigment, keeps stirring.
ROTHKO is unsure.
He looks at the painting.
The moment is passing.
He is getting desperate.
ROTHKO: (To himself, frustrated.) Come on…come on…come on… What does it need?
KEN: Red.
ROTHKO: I wasn’t talking to you!
Beat.
Tragically, the moment has passed for ROTHKO.
He flings the paintbrush away. It splatters.
He spins on KEN.
ROTHKO: DON’T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN!
He rages, stomping restlessly around the room.
ROTHKO: By what right do you speak?! By what right do you express an opinion on my work? Who the fuck are you? What have you done? What have you seen? Where have you earned the right to exist here with me and these things you don’t understand?! ‘RED?!’ You want to paint the thing?! Go ahead – here’s red–!
He clumsily slings packets of various red paints at KEN.
ROTHKO: And red! And red! And red! – I don’t even know what that means! What does ‘red’ mean to me? You mean scarlet? You mean crimson? You mean plum-mulberry-magenta-burgundy-salmon-carmine-carnelian-coral? Anything but ‘red!’ What is ‘RED?!’
ROTHKO stands, getting his breath, collecting himself.
Beat.
KEN picks up the packets of paint from the floor.
ROTHKO prowls, discontent.
Pause.
KEN: I meant sunrise.
ROTHKO: Sunrise?
KEN: I meant the red at sunrise… The feeling of it.
ROTHKO: (Derisive.) Oh, the ‘feeling of it.’
Beat.
KEN continues to clean up, clearing away the bucket of paint and brush.
Beat.
ROTHKO: What do you mean the feeling of it?
KEN: I didn’t mean red paint only. I meant the emotion of red at sunrise.
ROTHKO: Sunrise isn’t red.
KEN: Yes it is.
ROTHKO: I’m telling you it’s not.
KEN: Sunrise is red and red is sunrise.
KEN keeps cleaning up.
KEN: Red is heart beat. Red is passion. Red wine. Red roses. Red lipstick. Beets. Tulips. Peppers.
ROTHKO: Arterial blood.
KEN: That too.
ROTHKO thinks about it.
ROTHKO: Rust on the bike on the lawn.
KEN: And apples… And tomatoes.
ROTHKO: Dresden firestorm at night. The sun in Rousseau, the flag in Delacroix, the robe in El Greco.
KEN: A rabbit’s nose. An albino’s eyes. A parakeet.
ROTHKO: Florentine marble. Atomic flash. Nick yourself shaving, blood in the Barbasol.
KEN: The Ruby Slippers. Technicolor. That phone to the Kremlin on the President’s desk.
ROTHKO: Russian flag, Nazi flag, Chinese flag.
KEN: Persimmons. Pomegranates. Red Light District. Red tape. Rouge.
ROTHKO: Lava. Lobsters. Scorpions.
KEN: Stop sign. Sports car. A blush.
ROTHKO: Viscera. Flame. Dead Fauvists.
KEN: Traffic lights. Titian hair.
ROTHKO: Slash your wrists. Blood in the sink.
KEN: Santa Claus.
ROTHKO: Satan.
Beat.
ROTHKO: So…red.
KEN: Exactly.
ROTHKO gazes thoughtfully at his painting.
ROTHKO: We got more cigarettes?
KEN gets a pack of cigarettes from a drawer and tosses them to ROTHKO.
ROTHKO opens them and lights one as:
ROTHKO: More than anything, you know what?
KEN: What?
ROTHKO: Matisse’s painting ‘The Red Studio.’ It’s a picture of his own studio; the walls are a brilliant red, the floor and furniture, all red, like the color had radiated out of him and swallowed everything up. When the Modern first put that picture up I would spend hours looking at it. Day after day I would go… You could argue that everything I do today, you can trace the bloodlines back to that painting and those hours standing there, letting the painting work, allowing it to move… The more I looked at it the more it pulsated around me, I was totally saturated, it swallowed me… Such plains of red he made, such energetic blocks of color, such emotion!
Beat.
ROTHKO sits in an old arm chair, staring at the central painting. Exhausted and depressed.
KEN senses the change in ROTHKO’s mood.
ROTHKO takes off his thick glasses, cleans them on his shirt as:
ROTHKO: That was a long time ago.
KEN: It’s still there.
ROTHKO: I can’t look at it now.
KEN: Why?
ROTHKO: It’s too depressing.
KEN: How can all that red be depressing?
ROTHKO: I don’t see the red any more… Even in that painting, that total and profound emersion in red…it’s there. The mantel above a dresser, just over the centerline, set off by yellow of all goddamn things. He wanted it inescapable.
KEN: What?
ROTHKO: Black.
KEN: The color black?
ROTHKO: The thing black.
Beat.
ROTHKO: There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend… One day the black will swallow the red.
He puts on his glasses again and stares at his painting.