The Details
- Red
- January 18-22, 8 p.m., free
- Marjorie Barrick Museum, 895-3381
We’re all pretty familiar with the Hollywood actor’s turn to Broadway by now. Many a star has claimed the primacy of the stage in his craft, so much so that it plays almost like a PR move Zach Galifianakis might parody. Yet two UNLV film students and their professor are out to prove the truth of the cliché in their performance of John Logan’s Tony-winning play Red.
“The film industry has to be held responsible for the crap that gets turned out,” says the lively professor, Clarence Gilyard, as we sit in the nearly deserted, gymnasium-like Barrick Museum on UNLV’s empty, winter-break campus. “Part of this failure,” he elaborates, “lies in the film actor’s lack of training in examining the language of a script and having access to the immediate response of an audience.”
This problem inspired Gilyard to plan a stage production for the benefit of two actors, craft workshop students Sergiu Iva and Charles Cantrell. The tall, fair Cantrell and his physical opposite, the short, dark Iva were willing guinea pigs. Yet even their physical differences present unique challenges offscreen and onstage. “Wouldn’t [your character] notice the size difference between you two? Take him in,” Gilyard comments to Iva.
Red is the perfect material for this kind of experiential learning. The play treats the process of making art (and, conversely, making Cantrell’s character Ken an artist) not through the medium of acting but through painting. Setting us down in medias res at the high watermark of modernist painter Mark Rothko’s career, Red presents the creation of the artist’s Four Seasons restaurant commission, name-dropping modernist golden age heroes such as Mies van der Rohe along the way.
But from one look at rehearsal, the process isn’t as easy as orienting yourself on the stage or reveling in the marvels of modern art. “I just don’t know what I should be doing in this scene. I need more time,” Cantrell agonizes to Gilyard. The reply of “do the work” doesn’t seem to console him.
By the end of at least three hours of rehearsal, however: a breakthrough. Iva’s character has been retracing a scene in which he must describe and draw inspiration from the memory of his first encounter with Italian Renaissance painter Carvaggio’s work. After trying the scene a number of ways, visible frustration has set in. Gilyard interjects direction throughout, encouraging Iva to connect his personal experience with the words he recites.
Whether it’s this or rehearsing before the largest audience an up-and-coming screen actor is likely to get, when Iva gets it right, the whole room fights to suppress a standing ovation. Momentarily, the Barrick is a humming artist’s studio, alive with creation. This is quite an accomplishment given that we never see a sampling of Rothko’s work.
Notorious for depicting little but huge blocks of color, the painter’s art still sometimes inspires novice art appreciators to question the difference between a talented artist and any schmo off the street. Although celebrated in his day for his genius, Rothko was just as frequently panned as a mere fad, the way Mad Men’s Bert Cooper impugns the artist’s painting as nothing more than an investment that he expects to “double in value by next Christmas.”
These assessments had an adverse effect on the painter, and Logan doesn’t fail to treat this criticism through the young Ken, who appreciates Jackson Pollock’s Dionysian heights and, at times, eschews Rothko’s Apollonian pragmatism. But anyone who has ever forced himself to stand in front of a Rothko for more than a minute and says he doesn’t feel anything is probably lying.
At Barrick, two actors are hoping to be similarly affected by the audience that sits in place of Rothko’s invisible canvas. This once, though, it might be the canvas that is moved.
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