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TABLE OF CONTENTS

MISSION

Dear Friend,

Mark Rothko was commissioned to create the Sea-gram Murals in 1958, so the play you are about

to see takes place in the few years following that date, when Rothko himself was in his late 50s and early 60s. Being at that same point in my life and career, I quickly found that a lot of what Rothko had to say resonated with me when I first read this script. In some ways, I feel very different from Mark Rothko; in many ways I feel the same.

Following the events of this play, Rothko began to view his work as spiritual expression. One of his final works—a transcendent work, he hoped—is the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. He was eager for the chapel to be as far away from the center of the art world as possible—an environment for spiritual contemplation.

All artists view their work differ-ently. I’m fascinated by playwright John Logan’s take on the angels and demons that haunted the later life of the great American painter, Mark Rothko. I hope you will be too.

All the Best,

Bruce MillerArtistic Director

Virginia Repertory Theatre creates in Central Virginia professional productions of the great comedies, dramas and musicals—past, present and future. We seek to be a regional theatre of national standing. We embrace the art form in its entirety, presenting plays of all genres and national origins, serving an audience of all ages and backgrounds.

In keeping with the legacies of Barksdale and Theatre IV, the hallmark of our nonprofit company is community engage-ment. To that end, we seek national caliber excellence in the arts, education, children’s health, and community leadership.

4 Meet the Author / Theatre Gym5 Title Page6 Cast / Setting / Show Staff / Special Thanks7 – 8 Company Bios9 Tragic and Timeless10 – 11 Mark Rothko14 Staff

Cover Illustration by Robert Meganck

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MEET THE AUTHOR

AT THIS THEATRE: THEATRE GYM

John Logan was born in San Diego in 1961, the son of Nor-thern Ireland émigrés. He attended Chicago’s Northwestern University,

graduating in 1983. For 10 years he was a successful playwright at Chicago’s acclaimed Victory Gardens Theater, serving as a founding member of the com-pany’s playwrights ensemble. At Victory Gardens, he pre-miered Never the Sinner (1985), Hauptmann (1986), Music from a Locked Room (1989), and Scorched Earth (1991). In the late 90s he began a successful career in film, creating the screenplays for Any Given Sunday (1999, starring Al Pacino), Gladiator (2000, starring Russell Crowe, Oscar for Best Picture), The Aviator (2004, starring Leonardo

DiCaprio), Sweeney Todd (2007, starring Johnny Depp), Hugo (2011, Oscar nomination Best Screenplay), and Skyfall (2012, starring Daniel Craig and Dame Judi Dench).

RED, Logan’s most successful play, premiered at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2009 and transferred to Broadway in 2010, where it won six Tony Awards, including Best Play. This past March, Logan’s new play, Peter and Alice, opened In London to rave reviews, starring Dame Judi Dench. Peter and Alice concerns an actual meeting that took place in 1920s London between the aging woman who inspired Alice in Wonderland and the young man who inspired Peter Pan. This month (April), Logan’s newest play, I’ll Eat You Last, opens on Broadway, starring Bette Midler as the noto-rious Hollywood super-agent, Sue Mengers.

The lobby, rest rooms, rehearsal hall and dressing rooms at Virginia Rep Center are housed in what used to be the historic Little Theatre, which opened next door to the Empire (now the November) in 1912 as Richmond’s first purpose-built movie theatre. All previous cinemas in Richmond were converted storefront nick-elodeons. From 1936 until 1969, the Little Theatre was known as the Maggie Walker. The facility

in which you now sit is named Theatre Gym. It was originally a retail store known as Marshall’s before being converted to a Piggly Wiggly sometime in the 1920s. Theatre IV transformed the space into a studio theatre in 1990. Several of Richmond’s “Best Play of the Year” winners took place here, including Crimes of the Heart, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, and August: Osage County.

Artistic Director Bruce Miller

Managing Director Phil Whiteway

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DIRECTION Christopher Owens

THEATRE GYMVIRGINIA REP CENTER

COSTUME DESIGN Sarah Grady

STAGE MANAGEMENT Rick Brandt*

LIGHT DESIGN Lynne M. Hartman+

SET DESIGN Jacob Sailer

by JOHN LOGAN

MEET THE AUTHOR

AT THIS THEATRE: THEATRE GYM

SPONSORSHIP SUPPORT BY Frances, Andy and Ginny Lewis

ADDITIONAL FUNDING BY

RED is presented by special arrangement by Dramatists Play Service, Inc., New York.

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Mark Rothko David Bridgewater*Ken Maxwell Eddy*

CAST

FOR THIS PRODUCTION

Stage Manager Rick Brandt*Light Board/ Sound Operator Linwood GuytonWardrobe Nikki WraggDeck Crew Joey Sauthoff

TIME & PLACE

Rothko’s studio, 222 Bowery, New York City, 1958 - 1959

Virginia Rep wishes to thank John Ravenal, Sarah Eckhardt, and Suzanne Hall from the Virginia Museum, Aimee Joyaux from the Visual Arts Center and visual artists Javier Tapia and Brad Birchett for their time and expertise.

SPECIAL THANKS

* Member of Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the U.S.A.

+Member of USA, United Scenic Artists’, local 829

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COMPANY BIOS

David Bridgewater (Mark Rothko) has been working professionally as an actor, director and instructor for the past 29 years. He was last seen as Tupolski in The Pillow-man with Cadence Theatre. Other past local credits in-clude Bill in August: Osage County and John in Oleanna also with Cadence Theatre, Jim in Nice People Dancing

to Good Country Music and Joe in Becky’s New Car with Barksdale at Hanover Tavern, and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra with Richmond Shakespeare. With Virginia Repertory Theatre, Dave has performed over the years as Cyrano in Cyrano De Bergerac, Lennie in Of Mice and Men, John Proctor in The Crucible, and the title role in Hamlet. Film and TV credits include Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood, Nothing But the Truth, Commander in Chief, Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, Surface, and Line of Fire. Richmonders may recognize him as Otto from Chesterfield Auto Parts ads. Dave was the recipient of the 2008 Theresa Pollak Prize for excellence in theatre and is a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor cur-rently working as an instructor with SPARC’S Live Art Program.

Maxwell Eddy (Ken) is proud to be making his Virginia Rep debut in RED, far and away one of his all time favorite plays! NY credits include: Elmina’s Kitchen (SoHo Rep. dir. Oscar Eustis), A Doll’s House (Theater Reconstruction Ensemble) PunkRockLoveSong (Horse Trade Theater Co.), and A Midsummer Nights Dream

(Hudson Warehouse). Regional credits include Les Femmes Savantes and Richard II (Shakespeare Theatre of NJ), as well as Our Farm (Fresh Ground Pepper/Underground Arts Center, Phila). NYU Tisch credits in-clude Moments (dir. Moises Kaufman), The Frogs (dir. David Herskovitz), Oliver!(dir. Lear DeBessonet), and Bruce in Blue/Orange. Training: The Studio New York Conservatory. BFA: NYU Tisch, ETW. Thanks to Jessica, for reminding me.

Christopher Owens (Direction) has been the Artistic Director of the Virginia Shakespeare Festival in Williamsburg since 2004, having spent eighteen years prior heading professional theatre companies in Dallas, Texas and Winchester, Virginia. He has directed over 120 professional stage productions from Seattle to Sarasota including such favorites as King Lear, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, Amadeus, Noises Off, Summer and Smoke, the national tour of The Fourposter, and ten regional productions of A Christmas Carol. For VSF: The Tempest, Mac-beth, Love’s Labours Lost, The Complete History of America Abridged, The Winter’s Tale, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and Art. This fall he staged Serious Money for the UH/Alley Theatre program in Houston and will be directing Macbeth in Detroit in June. Training: Southern Methodist University in Dallas and The Juilliard School in New York un-der the direction of John Houseman. He is an Associate Professor

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COMPANY BIOS (continued)

of Theatre at the College of William & Mary where he is a recipient this year of the Plumeri Award for faculty excellence.

Jacob Sailer (Set Design) is a junior scenic design major at the Virginia Commonwealth University. He was the assistant designer for VCU’s The Elephant Man and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. He has worked as a carpenter for The Shenandoah Summer Music Theatre in Winchester Virginia and at The Monomoy Theatre in Cape Cod Massa-chusetts. This is Jacob’s first design for Virginia Rep.

Lynne M. Hartman (Lighting Design) has worked with Virginia Rep for 20 years. Recent Virginia Rep designs include Hay Fever, Lyle, Lyle Crocodile, The Magic Flute, Madeline’s Christmas, The Producers, Night Blooms, Spring Awakening, Seussical, Legacy of Light (2011 RTCC Award), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Sound of Music (2010 RTCC Award). Lynne has designed locally for TheatreVirginia, CenterStage, Richmond Ballet, Theatre VCU and Dogwood Dell among others. Regional design credits include The Lost Colony, McCarter Theatre, Auburn University, and Kings Dominion. Lynne held a Fellowship in Theatre at VMFA and was educated at Mary Washington and University of Maryland. Member USA, Local 829.

Sarah Grady (Costume Design) is the Assistant Costume Director for Virginia Repertory Theatre. Designs include: Madeline’s Christmas, Spring Awakening, God of Carnage, Circle Mirror Transformation, Sound of Music (a RTCC nominee for Best Costume Design), Children of a Lesser God, The BFG, Annie, A Christmas Story Brooklyn Boy, Scap-ino & Patchwork (Virginia Repertory Theatre); A Winter’s Tale (Henley Street & Richmond Shakespeare); Children’s Letters to God & Tick, Tick…Boom! (Stage 1 Theatre Company). For three lucky summers, Sarah traveled to Roma, Italy to work with the Operafestival di Roma to coordinate costumes for The Magic Flute, Suor Angelica, The Marriage of Figaro and Die Fledermaus.

Rick Brandt (Stage Manager) is happy to be back at Virginia Rep and working with this wonderful company. His previous credits include Night Blooms, Hay Fever, God of Carnage Lend Me a Tenor, Circle Mirror Transformation, Legacy of Light, Boleros for the Disenchanted, Children of a Lesser God, The Little Dog Laughed, This Wonderful Life, The Grapes of Wrath, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Onstage appearances include Gross Indecency: The Three Tri-als of Oscar Wilde, The Lark, Light Up the Sky, Talley’s Folly (Virginia Rep); Raised in Captivity, Bash: Latterday Plays, A Devil Inside (Theatre Gym), Richard III (Richmond Shakespeare Company), and Edward II (LiveArts).

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In a 1943 letter to the art editor at the New York Times, Mark Rothko and his close colleague Adolph Gottlieb wrote, “art is an adven-ture into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.” They fur-ther asserted that the subject of art had to be “tragic and timeless” and therefore that “it must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration; pictures for the home; pictures for over the mantle; pictures of the American scene; social pictures.” Indeed, over the next decade only a small group of fellow artists, critics, and museum curators followed Rothko on this adventure. By the late 1940s he had gained critical acclaim yet, like the rest of the Abstract Expressionists, he sold very few paintings and struggled to pay the bills.

Starting in the mid-1950s, how-ever, Rothko’s financial situation changed dramatically. Between 1955 and 1957 his income in-creased from $3,000 a year to $20,000 before tripling in 1958 to $60,000. Fortune magazine’s two-part article, “The Great International Art Market,” pub-lished in December of 1955 and January of 1956, helped provoke a run on the market by describing contemporary artists in general, and Rothko specifically, as great speculative investments. The article went so far as to predict

that a Rothko painting bought in 1955 for $1,250 would be worth $25,000 to $30,000 in 1965. (The Mad Men writers were not far off to have Bert Cooper reference the Rothko painting on his office wall and confide, “between you, me, and the lamppost, that thing should double in value by next Christmas.”) Suddenly Rothko had to confront his paintings as com-modities that had, in fact, become “pictures for the home” (despite their enormous scale), sought af-ter by those who were “spiritually attuned to interior decoration.”

RED situates Rothko in the midst of a struggle between his driving ambition and fear that his paintings have become merely popular. He imagines himself making an art historical contribution on par with Rem-brandt, yet the immense murals he is painting throughout the play are planned for display in a posh restaurant rather than a museum or a cathedral. When his assistant Ken points out the absurd clash between Rothko’s lofty rhetoric and the paintings’ proposed placement, he accu-rately implies that Rothko’s success is part of the tragedy.

SarahEckhardtistheAssistantCuratorofModernandContemporaryArtattheVirginiaMuseumofFineArt

TRAGIC AND TIMELESS by Sarah Eckhardt

James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko, A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), 340.

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MARK ROTHKO BIOGRAPHY

Born Marcus Rotkovitch in the town of Dvinsk, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, Mark Rothko immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of ten, settling in Portland, Oregon.

A gifted student, Rothko attended Yale University on scholarship from 1921-23, but disillusioned by the social milieu and finan- cial hardship, he dropped out and moved to New York to “bum around and starve a bit.” A chance invitation from a friend brought him to a drawing class at the Art Students League where he discovered his love of art. He took two classes there but was otherwise self-taught.

Rothko painted in a figurative style for nearly twenty years, his portraits and depictions of urban

life baring the soul of those living through The Great Depression in New York. The painter Milton Avery offered Rothko both artistic and nutritional nourishment during these lean years. In the 1930s, Rothko exhibited with The Ten, a close-knit group of American painters, which included fellow Avery acolyte, Adolph Gottlieb. Success was moderate at best but the group provided important incubation for the Abstract Expressionist school to come.

The war years brought with it an influx of European surrealists, influencing most of the New York painters, among them Rothko, to take on a neo-surrealist style. Rothko experimented with mythic and symbolic painting for five years before moving to pure

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abstraction in the mid 1940s and ultimately to his signature style of two or three rectangles floating in fields of saturated color in 1949.

Beginning in the early 1950s Rothko was heralded, along with Jackson Pollock, Willem deKo-oning, Franz Kline and others, as the standard bearers of the New American Painting—a truly American art that was not simply a derivative of European styles. By the late 1950s, Rothko was a celebrated (if not wealthy) artist, winning him three mural commissions that would dom-inate the latter part of his career. Only in the last of these, The Rothko Chapel in Houston was he able to realize his dream of a truly contemplative environment in which to interact deeply with his artwork.

RED presents a fictionalized account of Rothko’s frustrated first attempt to create such a space in New York’s Four Season’s restaurant. Rothko sought to create art that was timeless; paintings that expressed basic human concerns and emotions that remain constant not merely across decades but across generations and epochs. He looked to communicate with his viewer at the most elemental level and through his artwork, have a conversation that was intense, personal and, above all, honest. A viewer’s tears in front of one of his paintings told him he had succeeded. While creating a deeply expressive body of work and garnering critical acclaim, Rothko battled depression and his brilliant career ended in suicide in 1970.

Pop Art and Beyond: Tom Wesselmann is organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts with the collaboration of the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, New York. This exhibition is generously sponsored by the Sydney and Frances Lewis Endowment Fund. The Banner Exhibition Program at VMFA is supported by the Julia Louise Reynolds Fund. Media Partners: CBS 6, Style Weekly, RVANews. Image: Still Life #35, 1963, Tom Wesselmann (American, 1931– 2004), oil and collage on canvas. Estate of Tom Wesselmann. Art © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Apr 6 – Jul 28 Tickets:

www.VMFA.museum

z

Pop Art and Beyond: Tom Wesselmann

| 804 . 340 .1405 | www.VMFA.museum

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ARTISTIC

ArtisticDirector Bruce Miller AssociateArtisticDirector Chase Kniffen AssistanttotheArtisticDirector Kate Belleman InternandVolunteerManager/ProductionAssistant Katie Monfet

ADMINISTRATION

ManagingDirector Phil WhitewayControllerTracy CoogleAccountingManagerLucas HallAccountingAssistantSara Heifetz WillowLawnManager Tom McGranahan

PRODUCTION

TechnicalDirector Bruce Rennie ProductionManager/ AsstTechnicalDirector Wendy Vandergrift TechnicalDirector–Hanover David Powers Designer/Charge-Hanover Terrie Powers MasterCarpenter Hans Paul Carpenters Luke Robinson, Doug Wilkinson ScenicCharge Kristen Myrick MasterElectrician Jenna Ferree Audio/VisualSupervisor Derek Dumais PropsMaster Alex Whiteway CostumeDirector Sue Griffin AsstCostumeDirector Sarah Grady Cutter/Draper Marcia Miller Hailey Costumers Lynn West, Abby Winship ProductionInterns Emily Clarkson, Tommy Hawfield, Lauren Mistilis, Joey Sauthoff, Samantha Stephens, Nikki Wragg

TOURING AND EDUCATION

DirectorofTourOperations Eric Williams ArtsinEducationManager Ronnie Brown ArtsinEducationIntern Jessi Malicki CompanyManager Ford Flannagan TourManager Gordon Bass EducationalProjectsManager Brittany Taylor ArtsIntegrationManager Sarah Roquemore

COMMUNITY RELATIONS

AsstDevelopmentDirector Kate Rogge DonorStewardship/EventsManager Jennings Whiteway AdministrativeandCorporateAffairs Tony Foley CommunicationsDirector Susan Davenport InternetServicesManager Jessica Daugherty TessituraManager David Janeski PatronServices/GroupSales Mark Persinger Tessitura/TIVAmerica Andrew Boothby OfficeInterns Kyle Cornell, Juanita Smith GraphicDesignerCassandra Ellison Photographers Jay Paul, Aaron Sutton Illustrator Robert Meganck BoxOfficeManager Janine Serresseque AsstBoxOfficeManager Jill Porcelli BoxOfficeAssociates Brian Baéz, Erin Dabrowski, Michael Dabrowski, Shannon Frazier, Derek Gayle, Amy Girardi, Mel Mowry, Laine Peterson

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