What's wrong with "Red"?

Briefly, "Red" delves into the life of Mark Rothko at the time when he was preparing a suite of paintings for New York's Four Seasons restaurant. The drama unfolds between him and his young assistant, Ken.

Alfred Molina was a suitably volcanic Rothko; Eddie Redmayne ably bundled the longings and self-doubt of the overawed apprentice.

Yet much of the time it was like watching two gears that only occasionally mesh. While author John Logan might suggest that this was the point, it does not make for satisfying drama. It didn't help that Ken was saddled with an over-the-top backstory, which came driving into the play with all the finesse of a Zamboni.

It was as though Logan could not quite decide whether the play was about Rothko and his demons (Rothko vs. Rothko), or about the oedipal drama between a young painter and his artistic father. Watching these two move canvases about the set, and at one point join in a ballet of underpainting, was mesmerizing. But their arguments about art and meaning had an awfully familiar ring.

If I sound unsympathetic to Logan, I am not. He set himself an extremely difficult task, namely to get at the preoccupations of a great painter. These, unfortunately, do not yield much to language.

Painterly careers, however, do. I was reminded of this the next day, when I joined my artist husband on an expedition to a Brooklyn shop. The proprietor was a master known for creating exquisite paints. My husband wanted a tube of white only, but as the exquisite paint master put him through a Q&A, it felt as though we were still at the play, or rather in it, subjected to the imperious speechifying of Rothko.

The shop itself was wondrous, windowless and nest-like. Because there was so much to look at, I at first listened with just half an ear. The shelves were neatly stocked with jars of dazzling pigment. On one wall, in rows, were swatches of sample color. I kept looking at the reds especially, such beautiful reds, everything from tomato to maroon.

Eventually I noticed that what had begun as a technical discussion was turning into a mauling. The paint master was pushing every button known to insecure artists everywhere.

For starters, the guy who just left? He gets a million dollars for a painting.

And what kind of paint was my husband using now? Ah, really? Student paint.

Was my husband a New York artist? (Here it was all I could do not to interject, "No. Like Gerhard Richter is not one." But I held my peace.)

With just the white, the paint master was sure, my husband would be wasting his money, wasting the product. My husband stuck to his guns though, finally procuring what he had come for. As we fled, it seemed to me a younger artist might have wept.

We calmed ourselves with cupcakes in Chelsea, decided to skip the lurid Otto Dix show at the Neue Galerie. It rained the whole way back to New England. "Red" left only a modest impression on him, but the white paint, my husband says, is all that he had hoped.