Mark Rothko liked to hold forth. As a listener, you may have found his harangues enlightening, infuriating or “banal,” as Clement Greenberg did, but never funny. They weren’t stand-up. Yet the chief virtue of Red, John Logan’s play about Rothko that ran earlier this summer in New York, is that the artist’s patter—the most telling lines of which were lifted from James L. Breslin’s fascinating biography—comes across as hilarious. Alfred Molina, in his scariest role since Spider-Man 2, created a self-engrossed, choleric, bullying Rothko, not quite the figure this writer remembers but one better suited for the stage; together with Eddie Redmayne, who superbly incarnates an increasingly wounded and rebellious assistant, he is seen in late 1958, working on the paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building in Manhattan—pieces that he eventually refused to deliver and that ended up in London and Japan instead. READ MORE